Everything Narraloom does

A desktop application for planning a novel, writing it, and setting it as a finished book. One application, with no step in the middle where you export your manuscript into something else to make it printable.

Your work is very hard to lose

This is worth explaining properly, because it is the part people ask about last and care about most.

Narraloom does not wait for you to save. Your words are written to the application's own storage about half a second after you stop typing, before any file on disk is involved. Saving to the project folder happens on top of that, by itself, every two minutes.

The consequences are worth spelling out:

• Type for hours, close the application without saving, and lose nothing. The words were stored as you wrote them.
• Delete the project folder by accident and the book is still there. Open Narraloom, and it tells you the folder has gone and offers to write the project out again somewhere new. Text, chapters, characters, notes and pictures all come back.
• Every save keeps the one before it, twenty deep, inside the project folder. A bad afternoon is recoverable without any special step.
• Keep your own copies of a scene before a rewrite, label them, and put one back whenever you like. Restoring keeps a copy of what you are replacing first, so even undoing is undoable.
• Nothing is locked in. The project is a plain folder. The manuscript is readable text. Nothing needs Narraloom to get your writing back out.

There is no account, no sync, and nothing to sign in to. The application does not contact anyone.

Structure

• Parts, chapters and scenes, nested as deeply as a novel needs
• Drag to reorder anything, including moving a scene to another chapter
• Rename in place, anywhere it appears
• Corkboard view, with a card per scene
• Outline view, with a row per scene
• Collapse and expand chapters as the book gets long
• Include or exclude any chapter from the compiled book
• Front matter and back matter as their own pages, each knowing what it is: a dedication takes no page number and stays out of the contents, a blank page prints nothing at all
• Put a page in the ebook only, or the paperback only, for the ones that belong in one and not the other
• Scene status: to do, drafting, done
• Synopsis per scene
• Point of view per scene
• Word targets for the project, a chapter, or a single scene
• Live word counts against those targets
• Your own fields on scenes, as text, a list, or a tick box
• Outline columns for your own fields, with filtering
• Filter the corkboard the same way, by status, point of view or your own fields
• Find any scene, chapter, part or matter page by name, from the sidebar
• A Jump list of the whole book, to reach anything in one step

Writing

• A clean editor with no chrome in the way
• Bold, italic, strikethrough, headings, lists, links and horizontal rules
• Quoted passages for letters, diary entries and epigraphs, set as one passage on the page rather than a run of loose paragraphs, in the same face as the rest of your book unless you italicise it yourself
• Centre a line, or range it right, for a letter's signature or an inscription
• Verse, for poetry and inscriptions, with the line breaks you typed
• Focus mode, which washes out everything but the page
• Typewriter scrolling, keeping the line you are writing where your eyes are
• Smart quotes, dashes and ellipses as you type
• Undo across the whole project, not just the current scene
• Timed writing sprints with a word goal
• Spell check that ignores your own characters, places and invented words
• Search and replace across the entire manuscript at once, with case and whole word options, covering chapter and part titles as well as your prose
• A record of how much you write each day, over thirty days or twelve months

Your world

• Characters, locations, items, factions and lore
• Portraits and image galleries for each
• Custom fields, grouped into sections you name
• Aliases, so a character answers to more than one name
• Relationships between any two entries, recorded in both directions
• Mentions: name someone in your prose and the link is made for you
• Rename an entity everywhere it is mentioned, in one step
• A timeline of events, ordered and dated as your story needs
• Research notes kept beside the manuscript rather than in another application

The printed book

The part most writing software leaves to somebody else. Narraloom sets your book with a real typesetting engine, not a browser print dialogue, and what you preview is the file you upload.

• Five trim sizes, including 6 × 9″ and 5 × 8″
• Mirrored margins with a gutter that grows with the page count, to the thresholds print-on-demand services actually use
• Bleed handling for artwork that runs off the page
• Seven presets: Classic, Modern, Literary, Fantasy, Science fiction, Thriller and Romance
• Eight embedded book faces, among them EB Garamond, Libre Baskerville, Crimson Pro, Literata, Cinzel and Chakra Petch
• Body size, leading and paragraph indents under your control
• Running heads: author, title, chapter, or none
• Page numbers top or bottom, inside, outside or centred
• Blind folios on chapter openers and front matter, as convention expects
• Chapter openers: your own heading template, small caps or capitals, centred or ranged, with the sink you choose
• Drop caps, sunken or raised
• Scene break ornaments: fleuron, asterism, star, asterisk, dinkus, diamond band, vine band or rule
• Repeat an ornament across the measure, or set it once
• Your own artwork for any ornament, including SVG, sized from its own proportions
• Chapter opener artwork: a banner in the text block, a full-width banner bleeding off the page, or a full-page illustration with the title over it
• The exact pixel size your artwork needs, checked against it as you choose the file, so a soft print is caught before you upload rather than after
• Drawn frames for chapter openers: rules above the title, a full border, or corner pieces of your own, kept clear of the gutter at any page count
• A contents page, listing parts and chapters with the page each begins on
• Part pages with their own ornament and spacing
• A title page you control
• Recto starts, widow and orphan control, and proper hyphenation
• A chapter opener carrying a full-page illustration is left unnumbered, as an illustrated plate is in any printed book, and still counted
• A live preview of the actual pages, and a page count before you commit

The ebook

• EPUB 3, styled separately from the print edition, because a face drawn for a screen sets far too large on paper
• Drop caps and ornaments carried through
• Five embedded faces
• A proper navigation document, so a reader's contents and landmarks work
• Semantic front and back matter, so a dedication is marked as a dedication
• Tested on actual e-readers

Getting things in and out

• Import a manuscript from a Word document or a Markdown file
• Chapters, parts, scene breaks and front matter worked out for you, from headings where there are headings, and from numbering, layout and spacing where there are not
• Headings split across several lines read as one heading
• A chapter missing from the numbering is reported, and placed where the spacing says it belonged
• Everything found is shown for you to correct before anything is created
• Told plainly what could not be carried across — a table's rows and columns, an indented list's levels — rather than left to notice later
• Export to PDF, EPUB, Word and Markdown
• Word export in standard manuscript format, the one agents ask for
• Choose what goes into the compiled book: front matter, back matter, which chapters, and how headings read

Living with it

• Runs on Linux and Windows
• Opens and saves ordinary folders, so backing up is copying a folder
• Light and dark, in paper and ink
• Keyboard shortcuts for saving, searching and undo
• Recent projects, reopened where you left them
• Several projects, one at a time, without ceremony

Narraloom is free while it is in development. It will be paid from 1.0, and nothing you write before then stops working when that happens.