The editor

The editor is where the book gets written. It is a continuous canvas: every chapter is its own cream sheet at your real trim width with your real margins, stacked in order, and you scroll between them.

It is deliberately pageless. Live per-page reflow while you type needs a custom layout engine, and the approximations look right until they matter. So the draft flows, and exact pages are shown by a real typesetter on demand.

The toolbar

One row above the page. On the left are the formatting tools, in the order a word processor puts them:

• undo and redo
• paragraph style (normal text, headings, quote, code block), font and size. The font shows the name of the font your text is set in.
• bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, subscript and superscript, inline code, text colour and highlight
• bulleted and numbered lists, and alignment
• insert a link, image, table, scene break or page break
• clear formatting
• and, while the cursor is in a table, add and remove rows and columns

On the right are Write · Split · Page (the three views, below), the word count, ⋯ and, on narrower screens, Ask for the assistant (on a phone, it is on the bottom bar — see below). The word count is a button: behind it are book words against your target, chapters complete and words written this session.

On a wide screen every tool is in view. When the window is narrower, the tools you reach for least move into ⋯ first, starting with subscript, superscript and code; bold, italic, underline and the paragraph style stay longest. On a phone, bold, italic, underline and strikethrough stay on the toolbar with the rest in ⋯, and selecting text raises the most common ones beside it.

On a phone: the bottom bar

On a phone a bar along the bottom of the screen takes you around the book in one tap: Write (the page), Codex (your story's people, places and facts), Map (the story map) and Ask (the assistant). It is there on the page and on the map. Going back to Write while the assistant is working does not stop it — tap Ask to see how it is getting on.

Formatting selected text

Select a word or a passage and a small menu appears beside it: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, quote, link and ✦ Ask about this, which opens the assistant with the passage named in the message box. Nothing is sent until you add your question and press Send.

The whole passage goes with your question, however long it is, and a line above the message box says so ("Selected passage · 400 words"). It stays with the conversation while you are in that chapter, so a follow-up like "now make it shorter" means the same passage. Press ✕ on that line to let it go.

On a phone the menu sits at the foot of the screen instead, so it does not fight your phone's own copy-and-paste bar.

⋯ — the occasional tools

Any formatting tools the toolbar had no room for, then Print format, Zoom, History, Replace, Focus mode and the AI model. On a phone, the three views are here too.

Font sets a passage in a different typeface — a letter in a script hand, a signpost in a display face. It offers the same 1,600-plus Google Fonts as the Cover Studio: search by name or narrow to serif, sans, display, script or mono. Book default returns the passage to the book's body font, which you set in ⚙ Print format.

Everything these tools can do is styled identically in the editor and in the printed PDF. That is the point of the constraint: the editor has exactly the tools the print pipeline knows how to set.

⤓ Page break forces a new page, and the export honours it exactly.

The three views

• Write — the continuous draft canvas. Where you spend your time.
• Split — one chapter beside its live typeset pages. For fine-tuning.
• Page — the full typeset chapter. This is the print-true reference. What you see here is what the PDF contains, because it is the same engine.

Split is hidden on phones, where there is no room for two columns.

Focus mode

◱ Focus mode in ⋯ (or Ctrl + Shift + F) hides everything but the page: the app header, the toolbar and the chapter list. Press Esc, or Leave focus in the corner, to bring them back. The editor remembers the choice on this device.

The chapter list

The book in the order it prints:

• Front matter — Title page, Copyright, Dedication, Epigraph, Contents
• Chapters — click to jump to a chapter's sheet; ▲▼ reorder the active one
• Back matter — Acknowledgments, About the author

A front- or back-matter item opens as its own page, drawn the way it prints. Write on it directly. The title page and contents are built from your book, so they only have a switch; the copyright page has a switch and its fields (year, rights statement, ISBN, edition) — anything left blank prints the standard wording. A dedication, epigraph, acknowledgments or bio is in the book once it has text, and the list marks an unwritten one Empty.

Each chapter carries a goal and a synopsis, at the foot of the list.

The synopsis is worth filling in. When a chapter has one, it replaces the auto-generated excerpt in the "story so far" that later chapters are written against — your account of what happened, verbatim, instead of a machine's guess. It is also cheaper, which means more of the context budget goes to the writing.

On narrow screens the list is a slide-over drawer, opened with ❐ on the toolbar.

The assistant on a big job

The writing assistant lives beside the page. On a wide screen it is the ✦ Assistant tab of the panel that lists your chapters; on narrower screens ✦ Ask on the toolbar opens it, and on a phone Ask on the bottom bar. One message is one turn, and a turn has limits — on its steps, its time and the length of what it writes — so that its price is known before you press Send.

A big job can outgrow one turn: checking a long book, or working through several chapters. When a turn reaches its limit, it keeps everything it has done so far and shows Continue with the price of the next turn. Press it and the assistant picks up where it stopped, told what it has already done.

For a novel it can also:

• Draft the story foundation from your premise and outline, for you to accept or change. Free.
• Deepen a character into a full profile. Free.
• Read a long chapter in full. It reads a long chapter in parts and reads every part before it judges the whole.
• Review a chapter like a developmental editor: whether each scene turns, whether the emotion is earned, whether the dialogue carries subtext, and whether it ends with pull. It gives a verdict, what works, and the problems, each with a quote, so it can fix them one passage at a time. This uses one of the turn's paid work slots.

For non-fiction, Review a chapter reads as an editor of non-fiction instead: whether the chapter delivers what it promises, whether it is ordered, and which facts, figures and quotations you should check. It never confirms a fact for you.

The assistant on every step

The assistant is on every step of a manuscript: ① Premise, ② Outline, ③ Write, ④ Release, and a series' page. Open it with ✦ Assistant beside the step's title. It knows which step you are on, so "this" means the chapter or passage in front of you, and each step suggests its own first questions.

• On the Premise it can sharpen the premise, suggest titles, and change the book's details and front matter (dedication, epigraph, acknowledgments, about the author, copyright page) as a card you accept. It never invents facts about you, an ISBN or a dedication.
• On the Outline it can offer to draft every empty chapter. The card shows the price, the same as Draft the whole book, and nothing starts until you press it.
• On Release it reads the same release checks the page shows and tells you what is left. It never calls the book ready unless those checks do.
• On a series' page it works from one volume and can read the others. If no volume is open, it asks which one to start from.

Showing the assistant an image

Press the paperclip beside the message box, paste an image, or drop one on the box, and it goes with your next message (up to four). The assistant sees it and can talk about it: whether a character matches your description, what a reference photo of a place suggests for a scene, what a competing cover does. It keeps seeing the conversation's last four images on later turns, so "like the one I sent earlier" works.

An attached image is saved to your art library like any picture you upload, and counts toward your storage. A turn with an image costs the same as any other turn.

Book memory

A conversation can't re-read a whole novel every time you ask about it, so the assistant keeps a book memory: a short record of each chapter (what happens, the facts it establishes, the threads it opens and closes, whose point of view it is in, and who speaks). It reads the memory to answer questions about the whole book, and reads the chapter itself before it quotes or changes one.

The Memory line under Reading in the assistant says how much of the book the memory holds, for example "6 of 9 chapters". Update reads the chapters it is missing, or that you have changed since, at the price on the button. The price is per 10,000 words read, and only changed chapters are read again. The job appears as a card in the conversation, showing which chapter it is on, with Stop to end it.

If the job is stopped or fails, you pay only for the chapters it finished; the rest of the price is refunded. If the book changed after you saw a price, it won't start at the old one — it shows you the new price instead.

Whole-book checks

Some questions need every word of the book read, which no single conversation can do. Checks, at the end of the Memory line, lists the ones that run in the background:

• Review the book reads every chapter as an editor would, then judges the book as a whole: its shape, its pacing, what it sets up and never pays off.
• Check continuity checks every chapter against the rest of the book and the codex: names, ages, eye colours, dates, who knows what. It brings the book memory up to date first, and that is included in its price.
• Proofread finds typos, grammar and punctuation errors, doubled words and names spelled two ways. It leaves your style alone.
• Fact-check (non-fiction only) lists every claim a reader could hold you to — figures, dates, names, quotations, studies — with what to check and where. It cannot browse, so it never says a claim is confirmed; it says so plainly when it thinks one is wrong.

Each shows its price on its button, per 10,000 words. Press once to see Start · N cr, and again to start it. You can keep working, and the assistant can start one for you as a card.

A check you start appears as a card in the conversation. While it runs, the card shows how many chapters it has read, with Stop. When it ends, the same card says how much of the book it read, for example "3 findings in all 24 chapters", and what you were charged. A check that was stopped says so ("in 9 of 24 chapters — stopped") and is never shown as a clean book. The first few findings are on the card; Show all lists the rest. To see an earlier check's findings again, open Checks and press Show.

Every finding names its chapter and quotes the text exactly. Go to it opens that chapter. A proofreading finding has Apply fix, which is free and goes into the chapter's History so you can undo it. If you have changed that text since the check, it won't guess and asks you to fix it by hand. Other findings have Ask to fix, which hands the finding to the assistant.

Rewriting a range of chapters

Ask the assistant for a change that spans several chapters — "tighten the middle act", "make chapters 12 to 18 less expository" — and it offers to rewrite that range in the background, as a card with the price per 10,000 words. Nothing starts until you press it.

When it is done, each rewritten chapter comes back into the conversation as its own card: Review the change shows it word by word, Apply puts it in the chapter (undo it from History), Discard leaves the chapter as it is.

• Your edits are safe. If you change a chapter while the rewrite runs, its card won't apply over your changes; ask for that chapter again.
• A rewrite that ran out of room is not offered, and not charged. The message says which chapters that happened to.

Two things it will not do, by design:

• It never hands you a cut-off chapter. If a rewrite of a whole chapter runs out of room before the end, it is not shown at all, because accepting it would lose the chapter's ending. The assistant revises that chapter a passage at a time instead.
• A consistency check that did not finish says so. If the report runs out of room, the findings that arrived whole are still shown, marked as an unfinished check. The rest of the book is not reported as consistent, because nothing checked it.

Autosave

Continuous, debounced, to the cloud. The save status sits in the header.

Several things protect the work:

• Failed saves retry with backoff, and a banner appears if they keep failing.
• Closing the tab with unsaved changes warns you.
• A crash buffer is written locally on trouble and offered back next time you open the book.
• If the same book is edited in two places at once, the second save is refused rather than allowed to clobber the first, and the app offers to reload.

What to watch for

• On a phone, the Write canvas is not print-true. Margins are clamped so the text stays readable at 390px. Page view remains the reference.
• Off-screen chapters are not live editors until you scroll near them. This is what keeps a forty-chapter book responsive; the rendering is identical, so you will not see it happen.