Offline
What “offline” actually means here
A lot of software says offline and means “works badly for a while, then wants to reconnect”. This page says exactly which is which, so nothing is a surprise.
Works with no connection at all
Disconnect the network entirely and every one of these keeps working, indefinitely, with no degraded mode and no countdown:
- Writing, editing and formatting a manuscript
- Creating and opening projects and books
- All worldbuilding records, categories, custom fields and relationships
- Spell check and custom dictionaries
- Full-text search across a whole project
- Research, brain dumps, mind maps, outlines and arcs
- Tasks, calendar, goals and statistics
- Revision history, Trash, Archive and backups
- Every export format: PDF, EPUB, DOCX, ODT, RTF, HTML, Markdown, text and project archives
- Every import format
- The built-in AI engine
- A local language model, once you have installed one
- The complete help documentation
There is no licence check, no periodic verification, and no point at which QuillArk stops working because it has not heard from anywhere.
Needs the internet, once
- Downloading QuillArk itself — Once. After that the installer is a file on your disk.
- Downloading a local AI model, if you want one — That is between you and whoever distributes the model. QuillArk does not bundle one, and running it afterwards is offline.
- Installing extra spelling dictionaries — English ships with QuillArk. Adding another language means obtaining a Hunspell dictionary from somewhere.
What QuillArk never does
It does not check for updates on its own, it does not send usage data, and it does not upload your writing for any reason. The only socket it can open is to a local AI engine on your own machine, and the address is verified as a loopback address before anything is sent.