Changelog — Charc

Alpha Draft 1.2 October 24, 2026

Alpha Draft 1.2: the workspace

Charc has a new layout. Five modes along the top — Write, Plan, Design, Edit and Publish — each with its own rail of tools on the left, and panels that open when you need them and get out of the way when you don’t. Edit and Publish are new modes. The layout you had is still one switch away.

New

Modes — Write, Plan, Design, Edit and Publish along the top bar. Each mode keeps its tools on a rail at the left; a tool opens its panel beside the page, and the same click puts it away.
One toolbar, where you work — Formatting floats at the top of the page. In Write the full format bar is always there, as in a word processor; in Design and Plan it appears with a selection.
The command menu — Ctrl+K finds any tool or command by name. In Design and Plan, typing / opens it too.
Edit — One scene at a time, with its versions beside it. Keep a version, edit it, use it in the book, or compare two side by side. Merges and Find and Replace live here too.
Drafts from versions — Open a new draft built from the versions you choose while the working draft carries on. A draft’s structure has its own menu, with Add scene in plain sight.
Publish — Export is a mode of its own: every page of the book in a grid, the one you pick shown large beside it, with the format, the contents and the export one click away.
A dashboard you arrange — The project page is made of blocks: continue writing, your streak calendar, word counts, drafts and more. Move them, size them, add and hide them (with the Publish plan).
Your rails and top bar — With the Publish plan, arrange each mode’s rail and the top bar. Anything on the top bar can go on a rail and anything on a rail on the top bar, and the foot of the rail holds what you want on every rail. Right-click any of them to move it.
Sketched icons — On Daylight, the rail’s tools have a pencil-sketch look. Choose their size, or the simple icons, under Appearance.
New flames — Your writing streak has new sketched flames, and it now lives in the Streak calendar block on the dashboard.

Changes

The layout you had — Preferences › Appearance › Layout switches between the workspace and the classic layout, at once.
Reference — Docks at the right of the page in Write, and pops out from any other mode.
Find — Lists every match, and opens from the rail in Write and Edit.
Projects — Switch projects from the title at the top of the page.
Boards — The entry’s name sits centred at the top, and its name, tags and aliases are blocks like the rest. Group blocks, turn a table on and off, select several blocks with Shift or Ctrl in the Blocks list, and zoom from one control.
Larger text, wider rail — At the larger UI text sizes the rail widens so its labels fit.

Fixes

Restoring a .charc file — Designed pages keep their pictures.
Export — Choosing a print style after an ebook one sets the file back to PDF.
Preferences — The theme list opens beside its button the first time, not off to one side.
The example book — Arrives for every new account, even when the server is busy at sign-up.

Alpha Draft 1.1.5 October 22, 2026

Alpha Draft 1.1.5: designed ebooks, previewed for every reader

A mid-way update on the road to 1.2. Your designed pages now travel into the ebook, and the e-reader preview shows the real EPUB the way Kindle, Apple Books and Kobo will show it. Also new: element groups on the Design tab, front and back matter, and an EPUB built to Kindle Direct Publishing’s rules.

New

A preview for every reader — The e-reader preview now opens your real EPUB. Choose Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo and library apps, or Nook and Google Play, then a device. Kindle’s tablet, phone and e-reader sizes are measured against Amazon’s Kindle Previewer, so the pages fall where Kindle puts them.
Designed pages in the ebook — Each Design page chooses how it travels into the EPUB: as text that flows, as a picture, or left out. Chapter openers, drop caps, scene dividers and the cover come along, and shapes become type or a picture.
Your contents page, in the ebook — A designed contents page becomes the ebook’s contents, with links that work.
Print or ebook, page by page — A page can be print-only or ebook-only, and every element has its own Ebook switch.
Element groups — On the Design tab, Ctrl-click elements or drag a box around them, then group them with Ctrl+G. Groups show as folders in the elements list, can be named, and stay together as one row in the ebook.
Front and back matter — Mark an act or chapter as front or back matter from the outline’s menu, for an introduction or an afterword. It takes no chapter number in the book, the contents or the ebook, and the ebook files it as front or back matter.
An image file for ebooks — Choose Automatic, JPEG or a transparent PNG for each image. A transparent PNG shows the page behind it in Apple Books, Kobo and most readers; Kindle shows white.

Changes

EPUBs ready for Kindle Direct Publishing — Valid files, fonts embedded in a form Kindle keeps, typography that reads well on every screen, images sized for screens and kept under KDP’s 5 MB limit, and the navigation and details KDP asks for.
Apple Books keeps your font — Apple Books now shows the book in the typeface you chose.
The author comes from your Byline — Every export names the author from the Byline in Project settings.
Boards — The inspector follows what you select, and field labels are brighter on dark themes.
Menus — Right-click menus pop open.

Fixes

Kobo — The contents list now shows in Kobo’s app.
Kindle preview — Contents links show in blue, as they do on a Kindle.
Ebook pages — A contents page starts at the top of its screen, and part pages stay out of the ebook when Page Setup turns them off.
Characters and settings — Relationships survive a reload, and titles keep their weight, style and spacing.
Boards — Note cards keep their top edge.

Alpha Draft 1.1 October 20, 2026

Alpha Draft 1.1: start in a finished book

Every new account now opens on The Great Gatsby, made into a finished book in Charc, and you can look around it before you sign up. This update also brings story structures and the Charc Spiral for plotting, designed contents pages, footnotes that look like the book, block quote styles, and a long run of sync fixes.

New

A finished book to explore — New accounts start with a full edition of The Great Gatsby: designed pages, chapter plates, character boards and guide notes. It is your own copy to open and change, and it does not count toward your projects. You can look around it before you create an account.
Story structures — Start a project from a story structure, with a plot board to match, beat tags and a structure check. Includes the Charc Spiral, a structure for long books.
Designed contents pages — Design a contents page on the Design tab, with page numbers that keep up as the book changes.
Footnotes that look like the book — Labelled notes, a footnote style of your own, notes on designed pages, long notes that continue on the next page, and a note editor with italics.
Block quote styles — Choose how quotations are set, from the toolbar or in Page Setup.
More for boards — Shapes, ornaments and the pen on character and setting boards, Spiral and Title blocks, and zoom.
Drop caps and ornaments — A drawn set of drop caps from John D. Batten’s 1892 initials, a typeset capital in its own face and weight, and new Swash, Elven, floral and Celtic ornaments.
Image folders — Sort images into folders, select several at once, and move or delete them together.
Go to a page — Type a page number in page view to go straight there. Justified books now lay out three to four times faster.

Changes

One welcome tour — The tours that appeared the first time you opened each tab are gone. The ? button has help for every tab.
Settings as windows — Preferences and Project settings open as windows.
Design — The add-element buttons sit in the top bar, and a Weight control offers the font’s own weights.
Invites — Accept an invite with a different account, or ask the owner for access.

Fixes

Sync — An edit made on two devices is never lost, words typed while a save is on its way are kept, an old copy on one device can no longer replace newer work, and co-authors see each other’s writing at once.
Restoring a version — Your current text is kept before a version replaces it, and one Ctrl+Z undoes one step.
Scrap — A restored scene goes back to where it was.
History — The list of changes shows each scene by its name.
Dialogs and exports — Escape closes the dialog in front, and Markdown and text exports keep their paragraphs.

Hotfix October 17, 2026

Formatting in page view no longer splits a paragraph at a page break

When a paragraph runs from one page onto the next, page view shows it in two pieces. Using a toolbar button on that page — bold, italics, alignment, a list, a text style — could save those two pieces as two separate paragraphs, so a sentence broke in the middle and its second half started a new line. Toolbar changes in page view are now saved the same careful way your typing is, and the paragraph stays whole.

Fixed

A paragraph could split in two after formatting in page view. If you find a sentence broken across two paragraphs from before this fix, put the cursor at the start of the second half and press Backspace to join them.

Alpha Draft 1.0 October 15, 2026

Alpha Draft 1.0: print-ready design, Google sign-in and favorites

The biggest update yet. Charc is still in alpha, and the next step is Alpha Draft 1.1. This one brings a pen tool, image frames, full cover spreads and press-ready PDFs to the Design tab, a Relations tab for your cast and world, favorites across the app, and sign-in with Google.

New

Sign in with Google — Continue with Google on Sign in or Create account. Google always asks which account to use, so a shared computer or a second account is easy to pick.
Pen tool — Draw your own shapes on any design page: curves, corners and closed paths, with text that can wrap along the outline.
Image frames — An image now sits inside a frame. Move and crop the picture inside it, resize the frame from eight handles, and wrap text around the picture’s outline.
Cover spreads — Lay out the back, spine and front of a print cover as one spread. A spread image can sit anywhere across all three panels, at any size, with or without bleed.
Book mockup — See your cover as a closed 3D book, and save it as an image.
Interior spreads — Plates and images can run across two facing pages.
Press-ready print — A press proof, preflight checks before you compile, PDF/X-1a, page boxes and printer’s marks, overprint, and booklet signatures for home printing.
Hyphenation and OpenType — Justified text hyphenates properly in page view and in the PDF, with rules you set in Page Setup. Ligatures, old-style figures and small caps where your font has them.
Ink strokes and ink frames — Borders, dividers and picture frames with the texture of real ink.
Relations tab — Your cast and world as a Graph, a Spine through the story, and a World view.
Entity boards and tables — Lay out characters and places on a board or in a table. Co-authors see who else is on a page, and shared sections stay in step block by block.
Favorites — Star chapters, scenes, entities, single entity blocks, design pages, images, charts, notes and sources, and find them again in one place.
Notes — A place for loose notes beside the manuscript.
How Charc works — The features page is now a full walk through the app, section by section.

Changes

Create account in three steps — How to sign up, then your details, then a picture, so the panel stays short.
Tidier inspector — Every inspector section folds away, shows a short summary when closed, and remembers how you left it. Toggles are smaller.
One unit everywhere in Design — Positions and sizes all use the same unit: inches, millimetres or pixels, your choice. Snapping to edges, centres and other elements.
Menus — The outline right-click menu is shorter, with less-used options grouped into submenus. Citations have their own right-click menu. Dropdowns use Charc’s own list everywhere.
Show and hide — Hide any design element without deleting it.

Fixes

Projects stopped re-uploading — A project you had not changed no longer uploads itself again on every save.
Open in Charts — Every “Open in Charts” link works again.
Text boxes in Write — Clicking inside an inline text box’s inspector no longer closes the panel.
Cover background — A spread background shows in the page inspector, moves freely, and responds to Extend to bleed.
A long list of small fixes — Found in a full sweep of the app: panels, labels, dialogs and menus.

Hotfix October 4, 2026

A long scene in page view is saved whole, and the view stays where you put it

Page view only keeps the pages near your screen loaded. When you typed in a scene that ran past those pages, Charc saved the loaded pages and dropped the rest — a pasted chapter could come back as its first page or two. A writer reported it the day it happened, and it is fixed. If a scene of yours shrank in page view, the earlier text is in that scene’s history, and anything you deleted while trying to put it right is in the Scrap Pile.

Fixed

Editing a long scene in page view could cut it to the pages on screen. A scene is now always gathered from every one of its pages before it is saved, and if that is ever not possible, Charc refuses to save rather than save part of it. The pages of the scene you are writing in also stay loaded however far you scroll.
The view jumped back while you scrolled. After a rebuild, page view returned to where it had been a moment before you scrolled, and the caret pulled the view back if you had scrolled with the scrollbar or keyboard rather than the wheel. It now remembers the real position, treats any scrolling as yours, and never rebuilds the pages while you are scrolling.
Adding a scene in page view did nothing you could see. The sidebar’s + Add scene put the new scene at the very end of the book, outside any chapter, and left the cursor behind. It now goes in after the scene you are writing, and the cursor goes with it. The right-click Insert scene items can be undone.
Pasting was logged as an error and, on the free plan, version history was asked for a save every few seconds after one was declined. Both are quiet now.

Hotfix September 29, 2026

Exporting no longer touches your manuscript

To build a PDF, Charc lays out a second, hidden copy of your pages. If you typed while that was happening, the editor could gather the hidden copy along with the real one and save both — leaving a scene with its text repeated. That is fixed, along with two other faults in the same piece of code, one of which could have emptied a scene rather than doubling it.

Fixed

Typing during an export could duplicate a scene. Page view keeps a scene in pieces across the pages it spans, and every keystroke gathers those pieces back together to save the whole thing. The gather was searching the entire page, so during an export it found the hidden copy as well as yours and saved both. It now looks only at the pages you are actually reading.
What this means for your work — only the scene your cursor was in could be affected, and only if you typed while an export was running. If a scene of yours repeats itself from its opening line, the earlier text is in Scene versions in the manuscript tools panel; restoring it saves a copy of the current text first, so nothing is lost either way.
A scene could be emptied instead. The same gather would have saved an empty scene if it ran while page view was rebuilding and found no pieces at all. It now refuses to write anything when it finds nothing.
Designed pages exported in the wrong place — text running past the margins and lines cropped off the page, even though the preview was correct. The pages the exporter builds off-screen had no layout to measure, so anything you had positioned by hand was placed from a measurement of zero.

Draft 0.9 September 25, 2026

An appearance you set by area and by tab, and a scrap pile that shows what you cut

The appearance panel stops being one list of settings for the whole app. Every area of the interface — headings, titles, navigation, labels, the icons, the cards on the Progress page — can take its own face, colour and texture, and with Advanced on, each tab can carry its own set on top. It layers the way you would expect: your settings sit over the theme, and a tab’s settings sit over those, property by property, so anything you have not touched still comes from the theme. And the Scrap Pile stops describing what you deleted and shows it: an outline branch with its children, a scene with its prose, a designed page, a chart — each drawn by the same code that drew it when it was alive.

New

Fonts, colours and textures by area — Appearance → Fonts and Colors each open with an area picker: headings, titles, navigation, labels, the scene label, the card subtitle, block titles and bodies, and a new Icons area. Each area takes its own face, size, weight, tracking, case, style and colour. Every property resolves on its own, so setting a heading face does not touch its colour, and a value you have not set falls through to the theme.
Per-tab settings, behind Advanced — the Advanced toggle in the panel header shows a row of tab pills on Fonts, Colors and Texture: Every tab, then each tab by name. Pick a tab and what you set applies there only. Textures are the one exception to the layering: a tab’s set of textures replaces the app’s outright rather than mixing with it. Off by default, because these are the settings that can make things look bad quickly.
A full palette per tab — ground, surface, ink, muted, line, page and page ink — plus ink colours by role, so a tab can set its sans, serif, script and title colours apart.
Four new textures — Waves, Smoke, Honeycomb and Stars, the last drawn with Charc’s own four-pointed star. Every area carries its own texture, strength and scale, and the designer’s pasteboard texture now reaches the page view’s surround too.
Transparency for the progress colours — sliders for the act tracker, the stat card tint and the three phase colours.
A solid logomark for the dark themes — the feather on a rounded white plate, so it reads on Ember and Moonlight, with a matching wordmark for the open sidebar. Ember takes the real mark in place of the text stand-in it had.
The Scrap Pile renders what you cut. Outline nodes come back as the outline draws them, children and all, and the chevrons still fold; scenes come back as scene cards with their prose; character and setting blocks — fields, text, image, checklist — as blocks; designed pages through the same renderer the Design list uses for its thumbnails; charts and panel groups through the Charts tab’s own. A chart that was bound to your outline or characters says its figures are as of deletion. Nothing in a preview can be edited, and nothing in it can reach the project.
The pile is two columns that stack on their own — each card a thin frame around the item, sized to what it holds, with a hover × to delete for good. Clicking a card opens it in the tab, with Restore and Delete, in place of the old modal.
Reset arrows on every colour, and on the highlight-strength slider, dimmed while the theme is answering and lit once you have overridden it. Colour inputs are circles.

Changes

The appearance panel is a rail on the right, not a column between the navigation and your writing; its dropdowns fit their contents; and it is organised by property first — Fonts, Colors, Texture — with the area picker inside each.
Broad areas apply under specific ones. Navigation sits under the scene label and Label under the card subtitle, so the specific setting always wins.
Lavender — the white glow behind text and icons is gone; buttons are sentence case; the project title is larger and its script face no longer has its letters pulled apart.
Ember — Raleway as both the interface and the label face, in place of IBM Plex Mono, with sentence case to match; a larger project title; the Project Documents panel follows.
Moonlight — small controls take a hairline in the theme’s own border colour rather than a bright blue outline, and the progress cards are opaque.
Icons draw a touch lighter on the dark themes. A light stroke on a dark ground reads heavier than the same stroke on light, so the whole icon set drops from 1.9 to 1.6 there.
Highlight strength is a theme setting now. It was the one appearance value a theme could not reset, so Lavender and Moonlight could never hand back their softer default once the slider had been touched.
The progress cards’ highlight arrives in one beat rather than a base wash, a pause, then the rest — the pause read as a stutter on a dark ground.
The outline’s List view button shows a list, not the text mark it had borrowed.
The favicon shows the mark larger in the tab.

Fixes

The stat card colour did nothing on Moonlight — the theme’s own card background was wiping the tint.
Applying a theme left old per-area settings behind, so a face or colour you had set could outlive the theme change.
Global search results printed their icons as markup instead of drawing them; the scrap pile’s detail view had the same bug.
Opening Preferences showed defaults instead of your settings in several sections — two copies of the control sync had drifted apart.
The highlight-strength slider read 100 while the theme was drawing at 75.

Draft 0.8 September 17, 2026

Versions you name, drafts you seal, and character sheets you can shape

The manuscript’s past gets a proper vocabulary. A version is one scene at a moment you chose to keep; a snapshot is the whole book at a moment; a draft is a finished pass, sealed on the Progress page, that the trackers then move on from. Underneath, snapshots stopped copying the book and started pointing at the scenes they contain, which makes them nearly free and makes “bring back this one scene from the first draft” a single click. The Characters and Setting sheets became something you lay out rather than fill in: blocks with colour and borders, columns you can stack and resize, frames that hold other blocks, and the text blocks are now the document itself with the writing toolbar right there. And the app learned what kind of screen it is on.

New

Named scene versions — right-click a scene and Save version… to keep the scene as it stands, under a name. Versions never expire on any plan. They live in the Drafting sidebar’s Snapshots panel, open in the editor itself with the rest of the manuscript around them, and offer Restore and Compare. The Changes panel lists them pinned above the automatic history.
Sealed drafts — the Progress page’s draft bar reads Draft 1 · From outline with a Seal draft button. Sealing keeps the whole manuscript as Draft 1 and the trackers move on to Draft 2: each act gains a revision line counting the scenes that have changed since the seal, and the main bar counts scenes revised instead of words. A sealed draft can be read, compared against the working copy, restored a scene at a time, or restored whole.
Snapshots that point instead of copy. A snapshot now records which version of each scene it holds rather than a second copy of the text, so ten snapshots of a novel weigh kilobytes rather than megabytes, and any scene can be restored from any snapshot on its own. Snapshots you saved before keep working unchanged.
Block styling on character and setting sheets — right-click a block → Style block… for colour and tint strength, border (none, hairline, ink, colour), corner radius, padding, header style, and width (full, half, third). Blocks of half or third width sit beside each other.
Columns that stack and resize. Drop a block onto the top or bottom half of a block in a row to stack it in that column; drag the seam between columns to trade width between them; double-click the seam to even them out.
A Frame block — an empty block with a border that other blocks go in. Drag blocks into its well or right-click for Add block inside…; rows, stacks and styling all work inside it, and the frame’s own style stays off the blocks it holds.
Text blocks are the document. The text in a block and the text in its full-page editor were two renderings of one document that could disagree; now they are the same surface, in the same face and size, and the rich-text toolbar sits at the top of every entity tab. A Notes font preference sets that face; the default is the interface face.
Block types where you reach for them — a row of block marks above every sheet, the same grid in the section nav, and all twelve on the right-click menu: in the margins it adds the block where you clicked, on a block it adds after it. Text blocks also gain Open full document, Print and the timeline toggle on their menu, and the header keeps only its label and pin.
Adjustable sheet width — drag the ruler above a character or setting sheet, or pick a width in Preferences. Kept per screen size.
Layout that knows its screen. The window’s size picks a device class — phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, wide — and sidebar widths, collapsed panels and the like are kept per class, so a laptop and a desk monitor each remember their own arrangement. Tablets stack the Design tab’s page list, Elements and Inspector into the sidebar with resizable groups; touch screens get bigger targets and no hover-only controls.
Bands as a page type. A designed page can be a running band that renders at its own height, dragged on the canvas up to the full page between the margins. The old inline-element toggle retires.
A drawn highlight. Selected and hovered rows in every sidebar, the top-bar buttons, the progress cards and the document nav carry the pencil highlight from the marketing site. Toolbar marks sit in ink and take the accent on hover, app-wide. Profile pictures come in the same style too, with a picker on sign-up and in the account page.
Drafting sidebar panels can be hidden — right-click anywhere in the sidebar to hide or show Snapshots, Comments and Margin notes; each has a hide button of its own.
House marks in the reference panel, including a new note mark for Add note.

Changes

One History section in the Changes panel with a This scene / All scenes switch, in place of the separate Scene History and Writing History sections that were one history at two scopes.
Viewing a collaborator’s copy, an autosave or a snapshot is a small pill floating over the manuscript, not a band across it. Nothing moves when you switch; the toolbar dims and the ruler tints; Escape returns. Adopt as my copy lives on the collaborator row’s menu.
Completed phases go to the Chronicle. Marking a phase complete archives its card there; Reopen brings it back. Deleting an archived entry deletes the phase, after a confirm.
A scene version opens in the editor, one scene at its version with the working copy around it, rather than in a full-screen overlay.
The rich-text toolbar goes blue on hover — buttons, dropdowns and the colour pickers alike — and the Design list’s page thumbnails take a blue edge.
Raleway across the app and the site, one step heavier, as the interface sans; the homepage slideshow turns its pages; the public pages share one chrome stylesheet.

Fixes

Changing an inline image in the inspector scrolled the view away. The commit was taken for a keystroke and the typewriter scroll centred the caret, wherever it last was. It now scrolls only for real typing.
A rotated image reported 0° after a reload — the rotation was saved and rendered, but the custom-angle field was never written back on reselect. Slider type-ins now refresh on reselect too.
The Changes panel blinked on every sync tick while open. It is built off-screen now and swapped in only when something changed.
Sealed drafts, the Chronicle and the phase order vanished on reload. None of the three had a place on the server; the Chronicle had been silently emptying on every reload.
Dragging a block showed a drop mark that did nothing. Hover and drop decide the target the same way now, the whole sheet is a drop surface, and a full row of three shows no mark rather than one it cannot take.
Blocks could not be dragged out of a frame, and a styled frame recoloured the blocks inside it.
Images deleted from the library kept being requested by pages that still referred to them; references now heal when a project opens, and deleting a library image says where it is used.
Band pages had lost their positioning grid, capped at two inches, and let go of the drag handle mid-drag.
The homepage scrolled sideways by a hair, and the nav was bold on some pages and not others.

Draft 0.7.1 September 14, 2026

Designed pages land where you put them, streaks that actually start, and a sketched look across the app

A fixing release on top of Draft 0.7. Placing a designed page inside your manuscript now does the obvious thing — it takes the page you added it on, pours that page’s text through your design, and numbers itself correctly. Writing streaks start when you write, rather than only when you hit a target most days never reach. The interface icons are redrawn to match the illustrations, and every theme now carries its own icon colour, page surround and title face.

New

A sketched icon set — the toolbar marks, the landing page and the feature sections now share the style of the illustrations: ink line, open shapes, no stock glyphs. They render a touch larger than before, which most people will notice as “easier to hit” rather than as a redraw.
A separate Titles font — Appearance → Fonts gains Titles, which sets the face for your project title and the page heading only. Previously the Heading setting moved those together with the sidebar wordmark and every modal header, so there was no way to give titles their own voice. Defaults to following Heading, so nothing changes unless you choose it.
A script face for Lavender — the Lavender theme’s big titles are now set in Montez, a brush script. It is also available to every theme through the new Titles setting.

Changes

A designed page replaces the page you add it on. It used to float forward and become the next page, which meant you chose a page and the design appeared after it carrying text you had not been looking at. Now it takes that page’s position and the text already flowing there pours through your frames — so what you can see is what you get. Existing placements will shift back by one page.
Streaks count writing days, not goal days. A day now counts toward your streak when you write anything at all. Previously a day only counted if you met your daily goal, which defaults to 1,000 words — so for most writers the streak never started. Your existing history is recalculated under the new rule, and many people will find they have a longer streak than they knew.
Every theme colours its own interface. Toolbar icons take the theme accent — gold in Ember, indigo in Lavender — and follow a custom accent if you set one. The surround behind the page in page view and the page designer follows the theme too, instead of being light grey everywhere.

Fixes

Designed pages appeared pages away from where you inserted them — sometimes the next page, sometimes four later, with no pattern. The placement waited for a page boundary that happened to fall on a clean paragraph break, which in running prose is rare. It now takes the very next boundary, every time.
Designed pages showed the wrong page number, and could duplicate one — two pages both reading 17, or a facing spread reading 10 against 17. They were numbering themselves by physical position while every other page used its book number. Back-matter pages had the same fault.
A designed page could lay out nearly empty, showing a few lines with the rest of the frames blank, no matter how much text followed.
Page view lost your place when you switched tabs and came back, returning to the top of the manuscript. It now keeps your position, and does so across zoom changes and window resizes as well.
“Choose image” did nothing in the Design tab — every click on an image element’s image button failed silently.
Active writing minutes were under-recorded. Each time you loaded the app, the minutes you wrote before the first save were discarded, so sessions could show real word counts against zero time. Time recorded from now on is correct; earlier days remain as they were logged.
Pasted text was unreadable in the dark themes. A manuscript pasted from a word processor carries black text colour on every paragraph, which renders black on black in Ember and Moonlight. That default black is now ignored in dark themes — any colour you chose yourself is untouched.
Writers with no daily goal had an empty public profile — no writing heatmap, no word total, no longest streak. None of which had anything to do with wanting a target.

Draft 0.7 September 11, 2026

Designed pages your book pours through, text wrap around anything, and a page view that is the whole book

The biggest design release yet. Draw a page once — art, quotes, ornaments, and one or more body-text frames — then let your manuscript flow through it, repeating for a whole chapter or dropped in at a single moment. Text now wraps around images, shapes, quotes and anything else you place, including shapes you draw yourself with a pen-style editor. Front and back matter render inside the page view, so what you scroll is the finished book, numbered and mirrored the way it will print. And the Front Matter tab, which long ago outgrew its name, is now the Design tab.

New

Body-text frames & template pages — add a Body text frame to any designed page and your manuscript pours through it. Several frames fill in the order you number them, each can hold its own columns, and overflow continues to the next frame, the next copy of the page, then back into normal pages. Bind a template to a chapter from the outline and it repeats for the whole chapter; the text stays fully editable right there on the designed page.
Four ways to place a designed page — bind it to a chapter, insert it at the cursor from the toolbar, attach it before or after a scene from the outline, or hover any page in page view and drop it at that page break. Placements float forward to the next natural page boundary, so the page before one is never left half-empty, and each placed page carries a small label with a remove button.
Six body layouts to start from — Full Page, Margin Quote, Illustrated Opening, Split Art & Text, Two Frames, and Editorial, each arriving as ordinary elements you can move, resize and restyle.
Text wrap around anything — images, shapes, ornaments, charts and text blocks can all carve the text that flows past them, as a rectangle, circle, ellipse, or a shape you draw. A wrap gap sets the standoff, images clip to their wrap contour so what you see is what the text respects, and on multi-column frames a shape carves only the columns it actually covers.
Draw your own wrap shapes — a pen-style editor with draggable anchors: click a midpoint to add one, double-click to switch an anchor between corner and smooth, and a curve-tension slider bends the smooth ones into flowing contours. In the same window you can pan and zoom the image behind the shape to frame it — one tool for cropping and wrapping together.
Margin notes, rebuilt — hover either margin and a marker tracks the body’s baselines; click to leave a note on that exact line. Notes stack when crowded, ride with their paragraph as the text reflows (even across a page break), and carry real typography: size, line height, italic, bold, small caps, color, font and a vertical nudge. A large styled note is now all a margin display quote needs.
Your front and back matter, in the page view — title, copyright, dedication, contents and back pages render in the flow where they belong. Facing pages mirror against the real book, chapters still open on a right-hand page, and page numbers count from the first page of the story the way a printed book does. Double-click any designed page to jump straight to it in the Design tab.
Art behind your text — the elements list is now a layers panel: drag an element below a body-text frame and it renders underneath the story as background art, above it and it sits on top.
Vertical text — set any text element to read downward or upward for spines, cover art and margin labels, with all the usual typography controls intact.
Image cropping, three ways — crop the source image once and every use of it updates; set an exact pixel size and let the picture crop to fill; or pan and zoom a picture inside its box for a different framing on every page. Cropping is available from the image inspector, the Images tab, the Design tab, and right after an upload.
Text boxes that reach into the margin — a floated or full-width box can extend into the page margin while the text still wraps at the normal edge.
Continuity check — manuscript health now flags near-miss name spellings, hyphenation drift and characters who vanish mid-book, with the surrounding text so you can judge each one.

Changes

Front Matter is now Design — the tab holds front matter, body templates, covers and running bands, so it has the name to match. Nothing moved; everything is where you left it.
Indents are real characters — first-line indents are now ordinary spacing you can select, delete and move a cursor through, exactly as in Word or Google Docs. Existing documents convert themselves as you edit them.
Auto-scroll that holds still — the view no longer nudges itself while you type. The cursor roams freely inside a comfort zone and the page follows only when it leaves, with the zone’s height adjustable in Preferences.
Faster typing in page view — large manuscripts no longer stutter: saving to your device is batched, the book is no longer re-read on every keystroke, and pages only re-paginate when a line actually changes.
Free forever, and one paid plan — pricing is now Free (everything you need to write a book, with no time limit) and Publish at $59/year for deeper version history, generous storage and the export formats that make a finished book. The whole book designer — page layout, templates, covers, front matter — stays in the free plan for everyone; exports are where the plans differ.

Fixes

Pressing Enter and Backspace at a paragraph’s edge now does exactly one predictable thing. Adding a blank line above a paragraph moves that paragraph whole — keeping its notes with it — and deleting a blank line removes only the blank.
The cursor stays where you left it. Typing in a text box no longer throws the caret to the top of the page, the caret no longer disappears a moment after you stop typing, and a cursor at the start of an indented line no longer appears on the line above.
No more dropped keystrokes while the page catches up with you.
Margin notes hold their place through reflow, page splits, added and deleted lines.
Crop no longer breaks a designed page — cropping an image updates every reference to it, including designed pages and page backgrounds.
Designed pages fit their margins — frame sizes are measured against the text area, so poured text no longer ran past the bottom margin.

Draft 0.6.3 September 8, 2026

Your own fonts, two-column layouts, designed running headers & a findable settings panel

Three days of book-design features on top of the new pagination engine. Upload your own fonts — whole families at once — or add any Google Font by name, and use them everywhere from body text to cover art. Set your book in one or two columns on the same baseline grid. Design running headers and footers as full graphic layouts with live tokens, badges and pixel positioning. And find any option again: both settings panels now have a category sidebar with live search.

New

Custom fonts — upload TTF, OTF or WOFF files to your account library and they appear in every font picker: body text, chapter titles, headers, front matter, the editor toolbar. Drop a whole family folder and each face’s weight and italic are read from the font itself; files sharing a name become one family with true bold and italics. Or add any Google Font by typing its name. Fonts ride into PDF exports automatically, and co-authors on shared projects see them too.
Two-column layout — set body text in one or two columns per format, with a column gap control. Columns share the baseline grid, fill left-then-right, keep every page-turn rule (widows, orphans, sentence guards), and chapter openings span the full width. Exact in the PDF, like everything else in page view.
Running band designer — a dedicated Running band page type designs headers and footers as full graphic layouts: any element, positioned to the pixel (drag 1:1, arrow-key nudging, pixel inputs), with live tokens for page number, chapter and book info inserted from a click. Number badges keep folios centered in a circle or pill at any digit count. Assign a design as your running header or footer from the page itself or Project settings; height and gap controls live in both places.
Chapter heading pages, finished — the body-start guide shows exactly where text will begin (it snaps to the baseline grid), a Space before body control adds whole-line breathing room, running headers now appear on custom heading pages when your settings say so — with the artwork sliding down by whole lines to make room — and Fixed height finally centers anchored elements within the band it defines.
Part title pages gained a vertical position control (top, center, bottom).

Changes

Settings, reorganized — Project settings and Preferences both moved from one long page to a category sidebar with live search across every option, matched on labels, tooltips and content. Every dropdown uses Charc’s own smooth select control, fields sit on clean white surfaces, and rows read label-left, option-right throughout.
Front matter margins are honest on facing pages — standalone pages resolve inner and outer margins from their position in the book (the canvas names the side you’re designing), and margin guides now show on front matter pages when the preference is on.

Fixed

PDF bottom margins — exported pages could set type slightly larger than the screen measured, packing text into the bottom margin. The export now carries the exact measuring context, so printed pages match page view line for line; the compile preview was given the same treatment.
Floated images in the margins no longer clip at the content edge in page view or print.
Page numbers in badges render on book pages, and centered badges stay centered regardless of stray formatting.
Front matter designer — drag speed is exact at every zoom, settings changes repaint the canvas guides immediately, and the zoom control reaches 200%.

Draft 0.6.2 September 5, 2026

Print-true pages: a real baseline grid, wrapped images & smarter page turns

Page view now behaves like typeset paper. Every vertical measure in a book format — paragraphs, block quotes, scene dividers, chapter openings, split paragraphs, even images — sits on a fixed baseline grid, so facing pages end on the same last line the way a printed book does. Pages render at true print size no matter the window, screen or zoom: what you see on any device is exactly what exports. Around the grid, a new set of typographic controls decides where lines and sentences are allowed to break, and images can finally sit inside the text with the words flowing around them — correctly paginated, on the grid, and identical in the PDF.

New

Text wrap around images — float an image left or right and the surrounding paragraphs wrap around it, in the editor and in print. The paginator measures the image and its wrapped text together as one block, so the page still ends on the grid and the block never splits awkwardly across pages. A per-image Spacing slider sets the breathing room above and below.
Line & sentence breaks — a new Project settings section for how pages are allowed to turn: minimum lines a paragraph may leave behind (orphans) or carry over (widows); no lone word of a split sentence stranded at the foot or head of a page — the fix moves a word, never a whole line; a minimum word count for a paragraph’s last line; and “even out last lines” for balanced justified rag.
Names and titles hold together — Mr. Darcy, initials like J. G., name suffixes and No. 7 no longer break across lines, with an option to keep full names whole.
Images insert at the cursor — not at the top of the page or scene.

Changes

True print size — the page’s type is sized from the physical format, not the browser window. Opening a panel, resizing the window or switching machines no longer changes where lines break; zoom scales the whole page uniformly on top.
Everything in line units — block quote margins, scene dividers and chapter opening drops are all whole multiples of the body line, so a page carrying any of them still ends on the shared baseline.
Mid-paragraph page turns — the last line before a break now justifies like any other line; ragged edges are reserved for true paragraph ends.

Fixed

The missing line — pages that ended one line short of their neighbors, seemingly at random. Several compounding causes are closed: a footnote pass silently re-trimming pages the layout had filled correctly, viewport-dependent type sizing, and measurement caches surviving changes they shouldn’t have.
Split block quotes — a quote continued across a page break kept its margins and justification, no longer opened its page a line low, and editing the scene no longer saved it as two separate quotes.
Phantom charges — a scene divider was budgeted on pages where it never renders, gaping three lines; empty paragraphs cost a line the screen didn’t show.
Image editing — resizing an image now repaginates immediately instead of after a refresh, and the size slider no longer goes dead after the first drag.
Late-loading fonts and images — layout measured before a font or image finished loading now remeasures itself when it lands, instead of keeping the wrong numbers.
PDF export — exported pages carry the exact on-screen layout; a stale stylesheet in the print pipeline could previously drop the newest layout rules.

Hotfix September 2, 2026

Outline changes on solo projects now reach the server

On a project with no collaborators, changes to the outline — scene and chapter titles, synopses, ordering, colors and draft status — were saved on your device, but the server kept its earlier copy, so the two could drift apart. The merge that arbitrates between two people editing at once was running on projects that have only one. Prose was never affected: scenes sync through a separate path that was working correctly, as were shared projects.

Fixed

What this means for your work — it stayed on the device you wrote it on. Open the project there and make any edit; the current version is pushed everywhere from that point on. If a project looks out of date somewhere else, open it on the device you last wrote on before editing it elsewhere.

Draft 0.6 August 25, 2026

Screenplays, a mobile app that works, richer world-building & a health report for your prose

Three weeks of shipping. Charc now writes screenplays to submission standard, every panel is reachable on a phone, entity pages gain six new block types, and a manuscript health report reads your draft for crutch words, echoes and rhythm — entirely in your browser, with no AI anywhere near it. Underneath, a long run of fixes to history, sync and word counts makes the numbers you see the numbers that happened.

New

Screenplay mode — element formatting for scene headings, action, character cues, dialogue, parentheticals and transitions, with the Final Draft keyboard flow (Enter and Tab move between elements). Feature, TV and stage act structure in page view. Exports meet submission standard: a Screenplay (US Letter) format preset with industry metrics, (MORE) / (CONT’D) across page breaks, a proper title page, and Fountain export so nothing is locked in. A seeded demo script, The Midnight Archive, shows it off.
Charc on your phone — every side panel is now an off-canvas bottom sheet, one at a time, with buttons in the header for whatever the current tab offers: Reference everywhere, Drafting on Write, Sections on entity tabs, Pages and Inspector on Front Matter, Inspector on Charts, and Changes on the right. Sheets open at half height so the prose stays visible, shrink when the keyboard is up, and close with a swipe. The editor toolbar fills its first row before anything drops below; front matter fits the screen automatically; the outline board, its controls, both settings surfaces and the account menu all work on a small screen — and Project settings is finally reachable there.
Manuscript health — a report from the project dashboard: crutch and filter words with rates per thousand, repeated phrases with a jump to the scene, sentence rhythm per chapter, dialogue share and the said/asked census, passive voice, and readability. Deterministic text statistics computed in your browser; your manuscript never leaves your account and no AI reads it.
Six new entity blocks — Relations link entries to each other with a label and a click-through; Appearances lists every scene an entity is named in, automatically; Gallery for moodboards; Checklist for facts to verify; Excerpt for a kept passage with attribution; and Sources, which attaches bibliography entries from the Citations tab by reference so the bibliography stays one list.
Outline card view, rebuilt — Scrivener-style drill-down into an act or chapter with breadcrumbs, card width and height in named steps, text size separate from box size (up to 150%), the board flowing edge to edge and breaking only on acts, and double-click to open a scene in the manuscript. A default-view preference remembers list or cards.
Scrap pile, reorganized — a folder-style grid instead of a stack of cards, with search across titles, content and deletion dates, color-coded kinds you can recolor, a sort control, and a detail view with restore and delete.
Notes are real documents — reference-panel notes live in the project’s Papers, update live wherever they are shown, and open into the full document editor, which now carries a sync indicator. Images and charts pin to the reference panel too.
Line spacing for the whole book — set the spacing of every scene’s body paragraphs at once, for the move from draft to finished page.
Import as a first step — New Project offers “I already have a draft” beside starting blank, and the import picker is a list with a detail pane instead of four cards.
Lavender, finished — a full typographic identity for the theme: script display titles, Playfair headers, Lora text, with font tiers as theme variables. The old Moonlight retires and Dark Moonlight takes its name; six hidden themes are gone.
Styled dropdowns — the Compile window, the share panel’s role picker and New Project use Charc’s own select control, with option groups.
Account & sign-up — a confirm-password field at creation, typo-catching for email addresses, an escape hatch on the verify banner, optional gender and birth year on the account page, and a Restart tour option in the account menu.

Changes

Names — the Manuscript tab is Write and manuscript view is Pageless; Document Settings is Project settings; the New Project “Document preset” is Project format, with the format picker and manuscript language together in a Book Format box.
Side panels — every panel opens 50px wider by default; existing sizes are kept.
Outline scene rows — the separate “+ el” button is gone; it did the same thing as “+ pg”. Element-mode pages are badged in the picker instead.
History cadence — a full checkpoint is taken after 5,000 words of change or five days of edits, not daily; lookups are batched and retention runs server-side.
Scene locks — a claim releases after 60 seconds idle (was 25) and immediately when the tab closes.
Images — no per-image size cap on any plan; the image count and storage limits are the governors, so print-resolution cover art uploads.
Export — the file type opens on PDF, and a Letter (8.5×11) book preset joins the list.
Welcome tour — shows once per device rather than once per account, so signing up no longer replays it.
Appearance — Preferences explains how theme, custom appearance and per-project settings layer, and the phase, act and chapter colors follow the outline hierarchy in every theme.

Fixed

Page view with facing pages — text was measured against the wrong column width, leaving gaps at the bottom of every page; and a paragraph continuing across a page break was re-indented as if it were new.
Word counts — the daily counter could lose or re-add words; a server-side ledger now records every flush, and a lost create race no longer drops the words.
History storms — a stale tab colliding on a patch index used to trigger a full checkpoint; the server now assigns the index and collisions are gone.
Switching accounts — background saves could write against the previous account’s profile and day records. Identity changes now reload cleanly and every cached record is checked against the signed-in user.
Saves refused on real novels — the size guard measured 3.7× too high and blocked valid saves; caps now fit a full-length book and the reason is shown when a save is refused.
Automatic-save thinning never ran; it does now.
Collaboration — losing a claim race rolls back only the racing keystrokes; pending conflicts show as soon as the changes panel opens; the Changes badge no longer sticks at 9+; presence is armed wherever collaboration is, so scene locks always work; no more polling for collaborators a project doesn’t have.
Comments anchored at the start of a paragraph no longer detach.
Word export honors paragraph properties inherited from styles.
Export selection — ticking an entity group selected only its first entry.
Reference panel — images scroll instead of squashing, every block has a drag handle, pinning from the outline pins the synopsis, and a renamed note updates everywhere at once.
Outline board — horizontal act and chapter layouts no longer overflow, the plain board wraps, the height control works on cards without a synopsis, and Escape leaves a drill-down.
Themes — Dark Moonlight’s front matter and charts canvases were light and its account menu was white on white; scene cards sat below the page in light themes; Lavender’s raised surface was darker than the page.
Public profiles — a private profile could not read its own row, so creating it looped.
Backups — restore-path defects found in the August drills are closed, and migrations use the current PocketBase signature.
Sign-in — the verify link no longer shows sign-in when already signed in, and the top bar stays visible with no project selected.

Draft 0.5 August 2, 2026

Real-time collaboration, public writer profiles & print-ready covers

Charc becomes a place you can write with other people. Invite a coauthor to share your manuscript, an editor to work in their own copy, or an alpha reader to comment — and watch each other’s words appear as they’re typed. Every writer now has an optional public profile with a year of writing activity at a glance. Print covers gained full wraps, dust jackets, and true CMYK export. Plus a dedicated features page, a security pass, and a long list of fixes found in real two-account testing.

New

Real-time collaboration — invite people by email or straight from the app. A coauthor writes in your manuscript alongside you, an editor gets their own working copy to revise independently, and an alpha reader can read and comment but never edit. Everyone’s changes sync live.
Scene locks & live typing — only one person writes in a scene at a time, claimed automatically as you type. Everyone else sees that scene gently faded and read-only, with the writer’s words appearing character by character.
Presence — see who is in the project and which scene they are in, each shown with their profile picture and their own color. Choose your color per project in the share panel.
Comments in the margin — highlight any passage and leave a note. Comments appear for collaborators instantly, work on an editor’s separate copy as well as the main manuscript, and each person controls their own.
Working copies — read a collaborator’s version beside yours, compare the differences, and adopt their draft when it is the one you want. If someone leaves, their copy is kept for 30 days so re-inviting them resumes exactly where they stopped.
In-app invitations — pending invites appear in your project list; accept or decline without hunting through email. Email invites still go out to people who have not signed up yet.
Team permissions — grant a trusted coauthor the ability to invite and remove collaborators, and see team limits at a glance. Limits follow the project owner’s plan, so collaborators see the real numbers.
Public writer profile — claim a handle and get a page at charc.app/@yourhandle with your published works, works in progress, writing streak, and a year-at-a-glance calendar of your writing activity. Optional, and off by default.
Print covers — design full wraps with spine and back cover, or dust jackets with inside flaps, with bleed handled correctly and presets for KDP and IngramSpark trim sizes.
True print color — export covers as PDF/X-1a in CMYK so what your printer produces matches what you designed, with a clear warning when artwork falls below print resolution.
Features page — a complete tour of everything Charc does, at charc.app/features.

Changes

One export button for covers — the Print Spread toggle now decides what you get: a full print spread when on, a single ebook cover when off, instead of a separate dropdown.
Tooltips throughout the app — the browser’s default tooltip is replaced with a clean one matching Charc’s design, everywhere at once.
Comments sidebar redesign — the author’s picture, their comment in bold, and one line of the text they marked, at a comfortable reading size.
Quieter conflict handling — with scene locks in place, two people editing the same passage is rare enough that it no longer warrants a banner. A badge on the Changes panel handles it, and the message explains what actually happened.
Security headers — Charc now sends a strict content security policy, so no third-party script can run on the page.

Improved

Writing history is durable — daily word counts are recorded to an append-only ledger, your longest streak is kept as a permanent high-water mark, and backups now keep a rolling month of history, so a bad day can be recovered rather than reconstructed.
Lighter automatic backups — saves are thinned on a schedule (everything from the last two weeks, then daily, then weekly), reclaiming a large amount of storage without losing anything you would reach for.
Offline is a first-class case — write with no connection and Charc reconciles when you return. If someone changed the same scene meanwhile, both versions are shown side by side and nothing is merged behind your back.
Drafting sidebar — collaborator copies show their owner’s picture, automatic saves are marked with a diamond, and everything scales with your interface size preference.

Fixed

Daily word count ran away — an open tab could re-count the same session every few seconds, inflating a day’s total into the hundreds of thousands. Counts are flushed once now and are accurate.
Co-author edits could be lost — a round of hardening removed every path where one writer’s saved text could be overwritten by another’s, including duplicated paragraphs, resurrected deleted scenes, and truncated titles.
Comments could duplicate — reopening a project re-uploaded its comments, multiplying them each time. Existing duplicates have been cleaned up.
Pasting highlighted text — copying a commented passage no longer carries an unremovable underline into the new location, and affected text repairs itself.
Comments from the wrong project — switching projects could leave the previous project’s comments on screen; they are now tied to the project they belong to.
Blank covers and leaked guides — cover exports occasionally produced empty pages or included the designer’s selection outlines. Both fixed.
Sidebar resizing — the drag handles follow the cursor instead of lagging behind, and panel sizes are remembered correctly at every interface scale.

Draft 0.4 July 2026

Multilingual manuscripts, footnotes, e-reader preview & a faster app

The biggest release yet. Write your novel in seven languages with the right spellcheck, quotes, and export metadata. Footnotes and Chicago-style citations land in the manuscript. A floating e-reader previewer shows your book as readers will see it. Custom chapter headings flow from the page builder into page view, preview, and EPUB. Sign-in and page view got dramatically faster, snapshot comparison moved into the manuscript itself, and Charc got a brand-new logo and wordmark.

New

Manuscript language — set your project's language (English, Deutsch, Français, Español, Italiano, Português, Nederlands) in Document Settings. Spellcheck switches to the right dictionary for the manuscript and document editors, hyphenation follows the correct rules, and the special-characters panel leads with your language's quote marks. EPUB exports carry the proper dc:language so e-readers hyphenate and look up words correctly, DOCX exports set the document language so Word spellchecks in the right language, and works published to your profile render with the correct language too.
Smart quotes — straight quotes convert to your language's typographic quotes as you type: „…“ in German, « … » with proper narrow no-break spaces in French, «…» in Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, curly quotes in English and Dutch. Apostrophes inside words become typographic ’ automatically. Everything goes through the normal typing pipeline, so undo works as expected. On by default for non-English projects; toggle it in Document Settings.
Footnotes in the manuscript — footnote markers render inline in both writing and page view, with a hover preview of the note text so you never lose your place. Writing view lists each scene's footnotes at the end of the scene; page view runs a two-pass layout to place them at the bottom of the exact page they belong to, without slowing repagination. Footnote appearance is configurable in preferences.
Chicago-style citations — structured citation fields (author, title, publisher, year, and more) in the References tab, with segmented view tabs to switch between endnotes, footnotes, and bibliography views. Export options let you compile references as endnotes, footnotes, or a formatted bibliography.
E-reader preview — a draggable, resizable floating previewer that paginates your manuscript like a Kindle: white screen, Times New Roman default, column-accurate page breaks, and your custom chapter headings scaled to the device width. See exactly what readers will get before you export a single file.
Custom chapter headings — design a chapter heading page in the page builder and assign it to any chapter from the outline. It replaces the standard text heading in page view (with the running header automatically suppressed on that page), appears in the e-reader preview, and exports into the EPUB as a cropped heading image.
Book cover on the Progress page — mark a page-builder page as Cover, then enable "Cover replaces title" in the progress Customize menu. The cover renders full width at its true aspect ratio in place of the title, series, and subtitle, with your four stat cards displayed above it.
Per-project tabs — tab visibility is now saved per project, and new projects start with Timeline and Charts hidden to keep the workspace focused. Re-enable them any time in Preferences.
Manuscript nav context menu — right-click act and chapter rows in the drafting sidebar for quick actions. Collapse state now persists across reloads.
Outline card view context menus — right-click scene cards, chapter headers, and act headers in the outline's card view for the full command set: insert, move, duplicate, convert, flags, scene colors, and scrap. Scene colors now show on the card's top stripe.
Element remove controls — the chapter-heading and inline-element pickers now include remove buttons, so clearing an assigned page no longer requires digging through the page builder.

Changes

New logo & wordmark — Charc has a new logomark (now the favicon in your browser tab) and a new horizontal wordmark across the editor, the landing page, blog, FAQ, and changelog.
Snapshot compare moved into the manuscript — comparing against a snapshot now highlights insertions and deletions directly in your manuscript text instead of in the reference panel, which shows the clean snapshot alongside. Only one diff can be active at a time, so pinned-draft diffs and the compare diff no longer fight. New preference to underline added text, joining the existing colors, opacity, and strikethrough controls.
Outline toolbar split into two rows — the view switcher and undo/redo controls moved to their own row above the add buttons and toggles, so everything fits at larger UI scales.
After-scene pages removed — the short-lived after-scene page attachment was retired; front matter, back matter, and custom chapter headings cover those use cases.
Progress page Customize button — restyled in the accent color and inset from the header edge so it's easier to spot.

Improved

Much faster sign-in — account data now loads in parallel and scene content loads on demand per project, so accounts with many large projects sign in near-instantly instead of waiting several seconds. The app also renders from locally cached data immediately on launch while sync completes in the background.
Page view performance — windowed rendering keeps only the handful of pages around your viewport in the DOM, making long manuscripts smooth to scroll. Pagination measurement was reworked to be accurate for split paragraphs and footnotes, and the total page count now shows in the toolbar.
Page view zoom — the manuscript zoom control now applies to page view as well, and your scroll position is preserved when the zoom level changes.
Page view typography — new header and footer vertical-alignment and padding settings, headers and footers aligned flush to the text block edge, the running header suppressed on chapter-opening pages, and precise first-line alignment against the header rule so text starts exactly where it should.
Scroll position memory — manuscript and page view scroll positions are saved and restored when you switch projects, navigate to another tab and back, or refresh the page entirely.
Reference panel sizing — drag the reference panel out to the full width of the window. The manuscript hides once it would shrink below a third of the screen and returns when the panel is collapsed or resized down.
Outline node controls — add buttons (+CH, +SC) are now proper boxed buttons, custom fields (POV/tag, word target) have visible input boxes with consistent 22px heights, scene-row fields get white backgrounds in the Daylight theme, chapter word counts match the POV/tag contrast, and action buttons are uppercase for a cleaner scan.
Page builder editing — canvas text elements now save as you type instead of only on blur, and editor resize handles no longer leak into the saved page content.

Fixed

Margin comments failed to save with a "could not save comment" error due to a server-side schema mismatch. The error toast now also reports the status code when something goes wrong.
EPUB export now correctly embeds page-builder canvas images (an HTML entity in image URLs broke them) and custom chapter heading images, which are auto-cropped to their content.
Chapter heading pages assigned from the page builder are no longer duplicated into the EPUB's front matter section.
Custom column width in manuscript view no longer resets when applying unrelated document settings.
Blank page-builder templates now render their elements instead of an empty page.
Page view pages now inherit theme fonts and colors correctly (CSS variables are copied into each page shell).
Entity sidebar re-renders immediately when adding an entity or changing an icon color.
Removed a stray border seam under the sidebar logo area.

Draft 0.3 June 2026

Public profiles, DOCX export, writing streaks & doc editor

Writers can now publish their work and share a public profile page. Manuscript DOCX export lands in submission format. Daily writing streaks with a goal bar. A fully overhauled document editor with its own toolbar and zoom. Plus a new References tab, paragraph indents, and a wave of outline improvements.

New

Public profile pages — set a handle in Settings → Profile, make your profile public, and get a shareable URL at charc.app/profile.html?u=handle. Shows your writing streak, total words written, days active, and all published works.
Publish to profile — right-click any project in the sidebar and choose "Publish to profile" to snapshot the full manuscript and list it on your public page. Re-publishing updates the snapshot in place.
Manuscript reader — published works open at charc.app/read.html?p=id — a clean serif reader with chapter headings, scene breaks, a reading progress bar, and a link back to the author's profile.
Daily writing goal & streak — a word-count progress bar lives in the topbar. Hit your goal and a 🔥 streak badge appears showing consecutive days. Default goal is 1,000 words so the bar is visible from first launch. Set your own target in Settings → General.
Writing stats capture — every writing session records per-project word breakdown, session count, active writing minutes, first and last write hour, timezone, device, and OS. This data powers streaks today and will drive a Spotify Wrapped–style yearly recap when the stats page ships.
Manuscript DOCX export — compile your manuscript to a standard submission-format .docx: title page with contact block and word count, running header, double-spaced Courier New body, chapter headings, and scene breaks. Supports a byline field separate from the author name, plus affiliations and contact info lines.
References tab — a dedicated tab for managing endnotes and a bibliography section, separate from the reference panel.
Notes view in reference panel — toggle between the default Reference view and a Notes view that shows your endnote list inline with add/place/delete controls. Notes carry an Endnote or Footnote type, shown as EN/FN badges throughout.
Paragraph indents — span-based first-line indents replace CSS text-indent, with a configurable indent size preference. A "Fix Indents" action in the Fmt dropdown normalizes all scenes at once.
Drop caps — a paragraph walk system enables drop cap styling on first-scene paragraphs.
Hold-to-reorder outline — hold the backtick key to enter a reorder-only mode in the outline, preventing accidental edits while dragging.

Changes

Outline synopsis always visible — synopsis is now an inline textarea below each node instead of a click-to-edit toggle. New nodes collapse by default to reduce visual noise. Tab inserts an em-space indent.
Progress page phase list — phases from different types (Prewrite, Draft, Revision) can now be freely reordered by dragging across type boundaries. Type section headers were removed for a cleaner single list.

Improved

Document editor — full clone of the manuscript RTE toolbar (bold, italic, headings, lists, links) in every document editor instance. Each instance has its own independent toolbar so they never interfere. Zoom controls added; text scales with the manuscript zoom level. A sidebar reference panel is available in entity-overlay contexts. Type badge in the header identifies Scene, Synopsis, Paper, Character, Setting, or Notes documents.
Outline node styles (Daylight theme) — solid colored horizontal bars for chapter and scene nodes, with badge colors matched to the section hierarchy.
Act/chapter labels in manuscript — act and chapter titles can appear inline above the scene header, in the margin, or be hidden entirely. Labels inherit the hierarchy section colors and are right-aligned by default.
Scene title appearance — per-preference font, size, weight, and color for scene titles in manuscript view. Daylight theme defaults to Newsreader serif.
Sidebar scrollbar — hidden until the sidebar is hovered; appears on hover with a lighter thumb style.
Quick Print — bindable to any keyboard shortcut. Holding the backtick while clicking inverts the "show title" preference for that print only. Ctrl+P defaults to quick print.

Fixed

Backspacing at the start of an indented paragraph now correctly removes the indent span rather than merging paragraphs.
Outline keyboard shortcuts no longer fire when a synopsis textarea or contenteditable is focused.
Progress page "chapters done" counter now uses the same logic as the progress bar (scene count, phase status, or word target) so the two never disagree.
Chapter-only badge now right-aligns correctly when no act label is present.
Manuscript zoom factor now applies consistently to the changes panel and merge view prose areas.

Draft 0.2 June 2026

Sync, sharing, AI context & interface polish

Cross-device sync, project sharing, and an overhauled reference panel. Plus AI browser tool support and a full redesign of the preferences and document settings panels.

New

Cross-device sync — sign in to keep your projects in sync across browsers and devices.
Project sharing — share a project with another Charc user by email. Shared projects appear in their sidebar with a shared badge.
Account management page — view your plan, manage your subscription, and update your email or password.
AI Context — Charc can now expose your project structure to AI browser tools like Claude in Chrome via a hidden, machine-readable section in the page. Includes your outline, characters, places, and phase notes. Your data never leaves your browser — it is only visible to tools running in the same window. An optional full manuscript prose mode is also available. Toggle both on or off in Preferences.
Auto chapter word targets — chapters now show a calculated default target based on your project word goal divided by chapter count. Progress bars fill in automatically as you build your outline, with no manual target-setting required. Individual chapters can still be overridden.
Template word targets — the new project form sets a sensible default word target when you pick a template, with hint text that updates per template.

Changes

Preferences panel redesign — General and Custom Appearance tabs rebuilt from flat column layouts into a 3-column card grid. Settings grouped into labelled cards throughout.
Document settings panel redesign — rebuilt from a 4-column console layout into a 3-column card grid with sub-section dividers.

Improved

Reference panel — fully overhauled with consistent edge treatment, border depth, and inset shadow across all themes.
Inspector panels — front matter and charts inspectors updated with matching border and shadow treatment. The front matter inspector header now correctly renders its left border in the daylight theme.

Fixed

Entity sidebar showed a 1px border seam when collapsed to zero width.

Draft 0.1 May 2026

Initial release

Charc launches. A free writing workspace for novelists — outline, draft, track progress, and compile, all in the browser with no download required.

New

Manuscript editor — rich-text prose editor with manuscript and page view modes, scene-level editing, focus mode, and revision tracking.
Outline — hierarchical act / chapter / scene structure with drag-and-drop reordering, synopses, POV, and draft status per scene.
Characters & Places tabs — sketch pages with custom field blocks, text sections, and images for every character and location.
Progress page — phase-based word count tracking with per-chapter and per-act progress bars.
Drafts — save full manuscript snapshots on demand and compare any two drafts side by side.
Scrap pile — cut content is never deleted, always retrievable from the scrap pile tab.
Export — compile to PDF or export to JSON for backup and import.