Features

What QuillArk does

A complete list, grouped by the work it belongs to. Everything here is implemented and shipping — this is not a roadmap.

Writing

The manuscript

Manuscript editor — Paragraph styles, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, headings, lists, block quotes, alignment, indentation, superscript, subscript and special characters.
Chapters, scenes and parts — Arranged by drag and drop, with rules that refuse an arrangement a manuscript cannot have.
Front matter and back matter — Half title, title page, copyright, dedication, epigraph, contents, acknowledgements, glossary and more, as real parts of the book.
Scene breaks — A marker that each export renders correctly for its own format.
Local spell check — Hunspell dictionaries running on your machine, with suggestions and your own words added per project or globally.
Every font on your computer — Searchable, starrable, and checked for whether its licence permits embedding in an export.
Images with layout — Wrap left, wrap right, its own block, or inline, at a width set as a share of the text width.
Find and replace — Whole-word and case options, across the open document.
Focus mode and typewriter scrolling — For when the interface should disappear.
Split view — One to four panes in any arrangement — split any pane in either direction, drag each divide on its own, holding chapters, characters, notes, arcs, mind maps, outlines, corkboards and images.
Tabs for everywhere you work — Areas, books and projects open at the same time, each keeping its own pane arrangement, so checking a character does not cost your layout.

Story planning

Outlines — A single editable table of the whole book.
Corkboard — Summary cards you can rearrange, which are the same chapters.
Story arcs, character arcs and plot threads — Broken into beats, each tied to the chapter where it lands, with coverage shown against the book.
Scene metadata — Point of view, status, summary, labels, and the characters and places that appear.
Mind maps — Automatic layout, collapsible branches, and nodes that link to chapters and records.
Brain dumps — Catch an idea before it goes, then turn any part of it into a scene, a character, a note, a task or an arc.
Unplaced scenes — Write a scene before you know where it goes, and place it when you do.

Worldbuilding

Twenty-five categories to start — Characters, locations, organisations, cultures, species, creatures, magic systems, artifacts, technology, languages, religions, governments, events, lore and more.
Custom categories — Invent the ones your story needs; they get their own folder and their own fields.
Custom fields — Each category records what that kind of thing actually has.
Relationships — Typed links between records, and a graph of the whole web.
Everything is a file — Each record is Markdown with a readable header. Open one in any editor and it makes sense.

Organisation

Projects and multi-book series — A shared world across many books, each with its own manuscript and settings.
Full-text search — Phrase, all words, any words and wildcards, across manuscripts, records, notes and metadata.
Research — Notes with folders, tags and sources.
Tasks — Due dates, priorities and project links.
Calendar — Events tied to a project and a book.
Saved layouts — Name an arrangement of panes and return to it.

Safety

Atomic saves — Written to a temporary file, flushed to disk, then renamed. An interrupted save leaves the old file or the new one, never half of either.
Autosave — Debounced, with a maximum interval so a long unbroken stretch of typing still reaches disk.
Revision history — Separate from autosave. Compare and restore, and restoring saves the current text first so it can itself be undone.
Trash and Archive — Folder moves with a record of where each item came from. There is no permanent delete and no Empty Trash.
Backups — On demand or on a schedule, skipping projects nothing has changed in, and sending surplus backups to the Recycle Bin rather than nowhere.
Filesystem monitoring — Edit your files in another program and QuillArk notices. If a file changed on both sides, nothing is overwritten and you choose.
Crash recovery — An unclean shutdown is noticed on the next start.

Publishing

Page layout — QuillArk composes its own pages, so the on-screen print view and the exported PDF come from the same code.
Trim sizes and margins — 21 sizes, mirrored margins, gutters sized to the page count, and bleed.
Running heads and folios — Recto and verso, with roman numerals through the front matter.
Orphan and widow control — Paragraphs split with a minimum number of lines on each page.
Preflight — Metadata, structure, empty documents, images, margins, page count, ebook readiness and fonts that are not installed.
Export — PDF, EPUB 3, DOCX, a DOCX flavour for Google Docs, ODT, RTF, HTML, Markdown, plain text, and a full project archive.
Import — DOCX, ODT, RTF, EPUB, PDF text, HTML, Markdown, plain text, CSV, JSON and YAML, with chapter detection you review first. Drop files on the window and build the list up before importing.
Scene break styles — A marker of your choosing, or a PNG or SVG ornament of your own, drawn the same on screen as in the export.
Search that lands on the words — A result opens the chapter, selects the phrase and scrolls to it, with the find bar ready to step through the rest.

Local AI

Works with nothing installed — The built-in engine summarises chapters and scenes, extracts likely characters and places, and organises a brain dump.
Local models — Connect Ollama or llama.cpp for a language model, running on your own computer.
Checked before every request — The endpoint must resolve to your own machine. Anything else is refused before a request is made.
Not the point of the product — QuillArk is a writing application. The AI is a tool in it, and everything works without it.

Analytics

Word and character counts — Live, for the document, the selection and the book.
Writing history — Recorded as you write, not estimated: words per day, streaks, session lengths and daily averages.
Goals — Daily, weekly and monthly, measured against that real history.
Chapter statistics — Length, average, and progress towards a target.
Point of view and appearances — Which character carries which chapter, and where each record shows up.