These notes come straight from the project's changelog, so what you read here is what was
recorded when the work was done.
Version 1.4.0 current
Finding things, and being told when there is a newer QuillArk.
Searching
A search result takes you to the words. Clicking a manuscript result opens the chapter, puts the phrase into the find bar, selects the first match and scrolls to it. The arrows step through the rest. It used to open the chapter at the top and leave you to hunt.
Snippets show the text around the match. Searching two words used to centre the snippet on the first one found, which for "salt road" in a chapter opening "The road went on" meant you were shown the start of the chapter and told nothing. Rarer words now decide where to look, so a common word like "the" no longer drags the snippet somewhere useless.
Updates
Check for updates, in About. It asks the website for the newest version number and links to the download page if there is one. It downloads nothing and installs nothing, and it only ever asks when you press the button — never on launch, never in the background. Nothing is sent but the request: no account, no identifier, and nothing about what you are writing.
Fixed
Find and replace worked on the wrong text. Positions drifted by one for every paragraph above the match, so searching for a word in the fourth paragraph selected letters either side of it — and replacing overwrote them. Anything you replaced below the first paragraph was damaged. This is the most serious thing found so far and is fixed at the root, with tests.
Spelling corrections sometimes did nothing. After moving between areas and back, the right-click menu was applying its correction to an editor that had been discarded. It now works on the editor you are actually looking at.
An underline no longer lingers on a word you have just corrected, so the suggestions you are offered are never for a word that is already gone.
Correcting a spelling inside bold or italic text keeps the emphasis.
Every divide is its own. In a four-pane arrangement, widening the top-left pane now leaves the two below it exactly where they were. They used to share a line, so moving one moved the other.
Split any pane, side by side or one above the other, from two new buttons in its own strip. That reaches arrangements the named layouts never described — one tall pane beside two stacked, for instance.
Closing a pane gives its space back to its neighbours in proportion, and leaves the rest as they were. Closing one of four now leaves two above and one across the bottom, instead of rearranging everything into three columns.
Layouts you saved before this still open. They carry a name rather than an arrangement, so one is built from the name.
Version 1.2.0
Getting around, and getting things in. Areas, books and projects can be open at the same time and switched between; files can be dragged straight onto the window; and a scene break can be an ornament of your own.
Moving around
Tabs for areas, books and projects. Ctrl+click or middle-click an area in the sidebar, or a project on Home, and it opens in a tab of its own. A plain click still moves the tab you are in. Each tab remembers its project, book, area and pane arrangement, and puts them back when you return.
Right-click a tab to close it, close the others, or close everything to its left or right. Middle-click closes one. The strip appears only when more than one place is open.
A single click in the manuscript list opens a chapter in place, as a preview tab shown in italics that the next single click replaces — so looking through ten chapters leaves one tab rather than ten. A double click opens one that stays.
The same close options on the tabs inside a pane.
Panes
Panes now show everything they always claimed to: story arcs, mind maps, the outline, the corkboard, images, statistics and Help, as well as chapters, records and notes. Opening any of the others used to put "Nothing to show here" beside the chapter.
A new button above the workspace opens any arc, record, note, mind map, outline, corkboard or statistics into the pane you last used, without leaving the manuscript to go and find it.
Panes resize by dragging the divide between them, and each has its own close button. Closing one moves whatever it held into the first pane.
Importing
Drop files onto the QuillArk window and the Import Centre opens with them already read.
The list builds up rather than starting over, so the draft in one folder, the notes in another and a character sheet somewhere else can all come in at once. Dropping the same file twice does not list it twice, and each row can be taken back out.
Publishing
Scene break styles. Choose one of the common markers by name, type your own, or use a PNG or SVG of your own, copied into the project so the book stays self-contained. The editor draws the same ornament at the same shape, so the screen matches the export.
Exports open the folder they wrote to when they finish.
Fixed
Every dialog went dead after moving a project to Trash, until QuillArk was restarted. A native confirmation box leaves Chromium's web contents unable to receive real keystrokes — the window still in front, the field still focused, and nothing typed arriving. All twenty-three native dialogs are replaced with QuillArk's own, which is also what they should have looked like.
A blank line left between two paragraphs disappeared when the document was reopened. Markdown has no way to say "empty paragraph", so the gap was being dropped; it is now kept, and stays put across repeated saves.
The "Show me" button after an export failed for anything saved outside the Books folder.
Font discovery looked only one level deep. Correct for the flat Windows font folder, wrong for /usr/share/fonts, which holds nothing but subdirectories — so Linux found no system fonts at all.
A file dropped on the window used to make QuillArk navigate to it, replacing the writer's window with their own document.
The Help topic printed %APPDATA%QuillArk without its separator.
Version 1.1.0
QuillArk now runs on Linux. It is the same application from the same code, not a port with pieces missing, and a Books folder written on one platform opens on the other. This release also carries the visual identity work and the official website, neither of which had a release note of its own.
Linux
QuillArk runs on Linux, 64-bit. A Debian package for Linux Mint, Ubuntu and Debian, and a portable tarball for any other distribution.
The .deb installs into /opt/QuillArk, adds an applications-menu entry and a quillark command, and gives Chromium's sandbox helper the permissions it needs. Removing the package leaves your Books folder and your settings exactly where they are.
The tarball runs from anywhere with ./run.sh and installs nothing. It also carries install.sh and uninstall.sh for a system-wide install.
QuillArk no longer says "Windows Explorer" or "Recycle Bin" on a machine that has neither. The words for the file manager and the system trash are chosen once, from the platform it is actually running on.
A new Help topic, Windows and Linux, covering where settings live on each, what the trash is called, where fonts come from, and moving a Books folder between the two.
The Linux packages are built on Windows, which cannot store a Unix permission bit. Both archives are therefore written directly, with modes and symlinks declared rather than copied, so the application is executable and the sandbox helper is setuid on extraction.
Visual identity
The official QuillArk mark replaces the placeholder one throughout the application: first run, the header, About and Help.
The Windows icon is now the official nine-layer ICO — 16, 20, 24, 32, 40, 48, 64, 128 and 256 pixels, each drawn at its own size rather than downscaled.
The nine Image Bible colours exist once, as --quillark-* tokens. QuillArk Light and QuillArk Dark derive from them. Contrast is measured: fifteen pairs checked, body text above 7:1 on both.
Onboarding artwork on first launch, as a four-card tour that begins after setup is already finished and can be skipped from the first card.
Empty-state illustrations for projects, characters, research, mind maps, Trash and Archive.
A splash window that waits 400ms before drawing anything, closes the moment the real window is ready, and weighs 49 KB.
Installer sidebar and header artwork.
Website
The complete official website in Website/: 33 pages including 19 documentation topics, built with Astro to static files.
Documentation, release notes, version, file sizes and SHA-256 checksums are all extracted from this repository rather than typed twice.
Twenty-eight real screenshots of the application, captured in both themes.
Fixed
The Trash view no longer claims all of Trash is empty when only the current project's scope is.
listProjects(root, 'trashed') now finds projects inside their Trash and Archive wrapper folders instead of always returning nothing.
Silent installs no longer elevate and register per-machine.
EPUB font embedding now actually embeds fonts, honouring each font's licence bits. The setting previously did nothing.
Font discovery now looks inside subdirectories. Windows keeps its fonts in one flat folder, so this went unnoticed; on Linux, where /usr/share/fonts holds nothing but subdirectories, it meant no system fonts were found at all.
Version 1.0.0
First release. QuillArk is a complete offline writing application for Windows. Nothing in this list requires an account, a subscription, an internet connection, or any server. Nothing you write is transmitted anywhere.
Projects and structure
Projects and series, each a plain folder under a Books directory you choose.
New Project wizard: kind, genre, template, target length, series membership.
22 project templates across fiction, non-fiction, screen and stage, poetry, academic and personal writing, each creating an appropriate folder structure and starter categories.
Manuscript hierarchy of parts, chapters, scenes and folders, reordered by drag and drop with containment rules that prevent an invalid structure.
Front matter, body and back matter as first-class sections.
Multiple books per project, each with its own manuscript and metadata.
Writing
Rich text editor with bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, headings, lists, block quotes, alignment, indentation, superscript, subscript, horizontal rules and special characters.
Scene-break marker that renders correctly in every export format.
Find and replace across the open document, with whole-word and case options.
Focus mode and typewriter scrolling.
Local spell check (Hunspell dictionaries via nspell), with suggestions, per-project and global custom dictionaries, and no network use.
Images placed in the page with four layouts — its own block, wrap right, wrap left, or in the line — and a width set as a share of the text width, so a picture keeps its proportion at any trim size.
Word, character, page and reading-time counts, live.
Continuous, page and print layout views.
Worldbuilding and planning
Entity framework with 25 built-in categories and fully custom categories and fields, all stored as Markdown with YAML front matter.
Relationships between entities, with a relationship graph.
Story arcs, character arcs and plot threads, broken into beats that can be tied to chapters, with coverage shown against the book.
Unplaced scenes: write a scene before you know where it goes, then place it in the manuscript when you do.
Research notes and brain dumps, with tags and folders; a brain dump can be turned into a scene, an entity, a note, a task or an arc.
Mind maps with automatic layout, collapsible branches and free positioning.
Outline view and corkboard, both editable, both reflecting the same manuscript.
Name generator with cultural styles, syllable control and saved favourites.
Organisation and safety
Full-text search over everything, with phrase, all-words, any-words and wildcard queries, backed by SQLite FTS5.
Filesystem monitoring: edit your files in any other program and QuillArk notices, reloads, and offers a choice when a document changed on both sides.
Autosave, with atomic writes that survive a power cut mid-save.
Revision history per document, with side-by-side comparison and restore.
Trash and Archive. Nothing is ever permanently deleted from inside QuillArk.
Crash recovery.
Manual backups, and scheduled backups that skip projects nothing has changed in and move surplus backups to the Recycle Bin rather than deleting them.
Project health check.
Time, goals and insight
Calendar with events tied to projects and books.
Tasks with due dates, priorities and project links.
Daily, weekly and monthly word goals with real recorded history.
Statistics: words over time, writing streaks, session lengths, per-chapter breakdowns, and progress against target length, drawn from a running log rather than estimated.
Publishing
Publishing presets covering paperback, hardcover, large print, manuscript submission format and EPUB, all editable and duplicable, with 21 trim sizes.
Page composer with mirrored margins, gutters, recto and verso running heads, roman-numeral front matter, chapter-start rules, blank-page handling and orphan and widow control — used identically by the on-screen Print Layout view and the PDF export, so the preview and the file agree.
Preflight checks covering metadata, structure, images, margins, page count and fonts that are not installed on this computer.
Export to PDF, DOCX, EPUB 3, ODT, RTF, HTML, Markdown, plain text and a full project ZIP, plus a DOCX flavour tuned for opening in Google Docs.
EPUB font embedding, which reads each font's licence bits and refuses to embed one that forbids it.
Import from DOCX, ODT, RTF, EPUB, PDF, HTML, Markdown, plain text, CSV, JSON and YAML, with automatic chapter detection you can review before anything is written.
Interface
19 themes, including a high-contrast theme.
Basic and Advanced modes, so the interface can stay small until you want more.
Up to four panes, with any document, entity, note, outline or image in any of them, and named layouts you can save and return to.
Command palette.
Complete built-in help — 19 topics, all offline, including how your files are laid out on disk and how to read them without QuillArk.
Packaging
Windows installer (NSIS, per-user, no administrator rights required) and a portable build that runs from a folder.
Uninstalling never touches your Books folder.
Known limitations in this release
Word documents place images on their own line instead of wrapping text around them. The export warns you when a chapter uses a wrap. PDF, EPUB and HTML wrap as you set them.
PDFs are RGB. Amazon KDP and most print-on-demand services accept RGB; a printer that requires CMYK or PDF/X will need a conversion step outside QuillArk.
The bundled spell-check dictionary is English. Other languages work by adding a Hunspell dictionary, which QuillArk will use, but none are bundled.
The built-in AI is extractive — it summarises, finds names, checks consistency — and does not generate prose. Generative help requires a local engine such as Ollama, which QuillArk talks to over your own loopback address and never over the internet.
Windows only.
The installer is not code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen shows a warning on first run. BUILDING.md explains what to expect.
