Frequently asked questions

Charc is a writing app built specifically for novelists. It combines a structured outline tool with a full manuscript editor, progress tracking, character and setting notes, and a scrap pile — all in one place.

It runs entirely in your browser with no installation required.

No. Charc works immediately without an account — your work is saved locally in your browser. Creating a free account adds cloud sync so your projects are available on any device and protected against browser data being cleared.

Yes — please don't paste it in scene by scene! Click New Project and choose “I already have a draft”. Charc imports Word documents (.docx), Scrivener projects, and Fountain screenplays, detecting chapters and scenes automatically so your book arrives already structured.

Import runs entirely in your browser — your manuscript is not uploaded anywhere during the process.

First check your spam folder, then use Resend email in the banner at the top of the app. Two common causes: a typo in the address (the banner shows exactly where the email went, with a Wrong address? link to fix it), and school or workplace email systems, which often block mail from outside senders — a personal address works best.

You can keep writing while unverified — verification is only required for a few things like sending collaboration invites.

Charc saves automatically every time you make a change — there is no save button. Without an account, data is stored in your browser's local storage. With a free account, changes are also synced to the cloud in the background.

If you clear your browser data without an account, your projects will be lost. We recommend creating an account to keep your work safe.

The Outline tab is for planning — build a hierarchy of acts, chapters, and scenes, add synopses, and track structure before you write. The Write tab is where you write the actual prose for each scene. Changes to scene titles in either tab stay in sync.

In the Outline tab, use the + Act, + Chapter, and + Scene toolbar buttons. You can also right-click any node in the outline for contextual options. Nodes can be nested by dragging them onto one another.

Hover between scenes to reveal a + scene button in the separator. There is also a permanent + scene button at the bottom of the last scene. Scenes added in the Manuscript are also reflected in the Outline.

The Scrap Pile is a freeform notes area for anything that doesn't fit the main structure — deleted scenes you might reuse, research notes, alternative ideas, or character backstory. Nothing in the Scrap Pile counts toward word count.

Yes. Hover over the right edge of any sidebar until the cursor changes to a resize arrow, then drag to your preferred width. Widths are saved automatically.

Page View renders your manuscript as discrete pages as you type — showing exactly how your text breaks across pages with your chosen font, margins, and spacing. It works like a live preview of your printed document.

Switch between Page View and the Pageless view using the view toggle buttons in the Write tab toolbar.

Yes. The References tab lets you add footnotes, endnotes, and bibliography entries to your project. In the manuscript, footnote markers appear as inline superscripts — hover over a marker to preview the note without leaving the page.

Two layers. Snapshots are named save points you create yourself from the Drafting panel — take one before any big rewrite. Automatic scene history runs in the background as you write: on the free plan it records a point roughly every 14 minutes or 50 changed words per scene (edits in between fold into the next point, so nothing is lost); Pro records continuously. Restore or compare any point from the Drafting panel.

Yes. Choose the Screenplay template when creating a project. You get proper screenplay elements — sluglines, cues, dialogue, parentheticals, transitions — with Tab cycling between them, industry-standard Courier formatting on US Letter, automatic (MORE)/(CONT'D) at page breaks, and a script title page.

Charc also imports and exports Fountain (.fountain), so scripts move cleanly to and from Highland, Fade In, WriterDuet and friends.

Press F11 or the focus button at the right of the toolbar and everything disappears except your words — no sidebars, no panels, no counters. Press Esc or the Exit button to come back. Good for drafting; the outline will still be there when you return.

Press Ctrl+F to find or Ctrl+H to find and replace, from anywhere in the Write tab. Matches update as you type, and replacement works scene by scene or all at once. Available on every plan.

Yes — open Preferences → Shortcuts from the account menu. Every editor, outline, and app action can be rebound, and the same panel is the reference card for what the current bindings are.

The search box in the top bar looks across everything at once — scene text, scene titles, characters, places, notes, and charts. Results jump straight to the match, and filters let you narrow by tab or by scene metadata like status and POV.

Right-click any scene in the Outline to set its status (drafting, revising, done…), point-of-view character, and free-form keywords. They show up in search filters and in the compile dialog, so “export only finished scenes” or “find every scene in Mara’s POV” are one step.

The panel on the right side of the Write tab keeps research beside your prose. Pin anything to it — a character page, an outline note, an image, another scene — with the pin button that appears on those items, and it stays in view while you write.

The panel’s Notes tab inserts footnotes and endnotes at the cursor, and pinned snapshots become side-by-side compare blocks with a word-level diff.

The Characters and Setting tabs are structured pages built from blocks — text sections, images, and multi-column groups you can arrange per entry. Keep the eye color, the family tree, and the floor plan somewhere findable instead of scrolling back through chapter four. Any block can be pinned to the Reference panel.

Yes — click + at the end of the tab bar to add a custom reference tab: Research, Magic, Religion, Symbolism, or one you name yourself. They work exactly like Characters and Setting. The Research tab is included on every plan; additional custom tabs are part of the paid plans.

Right-click the tab bar to rename tabs or show and hide them — including built-in tabs like Timeline and Charts, which start hidden on new projects.

Upload to the Images tab (drag and drop works), then insert from there into scenes, character pages, charts, or front matter. There is no per-image size limit — even print-resolution cover art uploads fine. The free plan includes 30 images and 1 GB of storage, Plus 150 images and 5 GB, Pro unlimited images and 30 GB.

No. Charc is not an AI app in any way. Nothing in it generates, rewrites or suggests prose, and your manuscript is never sent to an AI — not for analysis, not for suggestions, not for training. There is nothing to opt out of, because there is nothing to opt into.

Charc does automate some things — word counts and streaks, the auto-synced charts, the manuscript health report — and every one of those is formulaic: ordinary rules and text statistics computed in your browser, the same answer every time, with the evidence shown. Nothing is inferred, and nothing reads your book.

That is a statement about what Charc is today, not a vow against tools. We may offer additional tools or integrations in the future, including ones that use AI. If we do, they will be separate, clearly labelled, and entirely opt-in — sending your book anywhere will always be a decision you make, never a default you discover. And your manuscript is yours: export it and run whatever you trust over it.

Spelling comes from your browser’s built-in spellcheck. Beyond that, the manuscript health report (on the project dashboard) covers the essential prose checks — overused and filter words, repeated phrases, sentence rhythm, dialogue balance, passive voice, readability — computed entirely in your browser. No AI reads your manuscript, and your words never leave your account.

For deep grammar checking or AI-driven critique, export a DOCX and run the tool you trust over it — that’s your call to make, and clean exports exist so you can. See our honest comparison with ProWritingAid.

The Charts tab makes timelines, family trees, bar and line charts, and data tables — story structure, relationship maps, tension curves. Charts render live as you edit and can be inserted into the manuscript or onto front matter pages. (Charts starts hidden on new projects: right-click the tab bar to show it.)

Charts is still in active development during the alpha — what is here works, but it has not reached its final form.

The Progress tab gives you an overview of your project. The top cards show total words written, draft completion percentage, chapters finished, and your current writing phase. Below that you can set word count targets for each chapter.

Click the Words written card to set an overall word count goal.

Words you add each day count toward that day's total, and any day with new words extends your streak. Deleting or trimming earlier material doesn't subtract from days already banked — revision never erases past progress. Counts follow your account, whatever device you write on.

Timeline lays your scenes out in story time rather than manuscript order — useful when the telling is non-linear but the chronology still has to hold together. Scenes without an explicit story time slot in by manuscript position.

Timeline starts hidden on new projects: right-click the tab bar and choose it under Show / Hide Tabs.

The Timeline tab is still in active development during the alpha — what is here works, but it has not reached its final form.

The Progress tab tracks which phase your book is in — Prewrite, Draft, Revise, or phases you define — each with its own notes and word target. Finishing a phase moves the card along, which is quietly one of the most satisfying clicks in the app.

Use the Export button in the Write tab toolbar. Charc supports DOCX, PDF (standard, and print-ready with bleed), EPUB, HTML, Markdown, Plain Text, Fountain for screenplays, and a complete .charc backup of your project. Choose which scenes to include and pick your format before exporting.

Manuscript PDF produces a submission-standard document: Tinos 12pt (metrically identical to Times New Roman), double-spaced, 1-inch margins, and a running header with your surname, a short title, and the page number. Page 1 shows your author info and word count in the upper left. This format is accepted by most literary agents and publishers.

Page View PDF renders your manuscript exactly as it appears in Charc's page view — your chosen font, size, line spacing, margins, headers, and footers. It requires an internet connection and is ideal for sharing a polished draft or sending to a beta reader.

EPUB export produces a reflowable EPUB 3 file with your chapter structure, scene breaks, embedded fonts, and images. It opens in Calibre, Apple Books, Kindle (via Send to Kindle or conversion), and most e-readers. Fixed-layout EPUB and direct Send-to-Kindle are planned for a future update.

DOCX and Manuscript PDF work offline using browser-based fallbacks — output quality may differ slightly from the server-rendered version. Page View PDF and EPUB require an internet connection; a message is shown if you try to export without one.

The Front Matter tab designs the opening pages of your book — title page, copyright, dedication, epigraph, table of contents and more — from ready-made templates you can freely edit. Drag the page cards to reorder; the order there is the order they export, ahead of chapter one.

Front matter and covers are still in active development during the alpha — what is here works, but it have not reached its final form.

A project carries a page layout — trim size, margins, body font, line spacing, headers and footers. Built-in formats cover the common cases: Standard Manuscript (8.5×11) for submissions, Trade Paperback (6×9), Digest, Mass Market, Large Print, Letter, and Ebook.

Headers and footers take tokens — {page}, {title}, {author} — and print-style books support facing pages with mirrored margins and headers.

Yes — the cover designer lays out the full wrap: back cover, spine, and front cover as one spread, with spine width computed from your page count and live bleed guides. Export of the complete print-ready spread is on the roadmap; front cover art already flows into your EPUB.

The print-ready export produces PDF with bleed and a PDF/X-1a variant in CMYK — the format print-on-demand services and offset printers ask for. Choose “PDF — print-ready with bleed” in the export dialog; your page layout’s trim size and bleed settings carry through exactly.

Before exporting an EPUB you can preview the book as an e-reader would render it — reflowable text, your chapter structure, scene breaks and images — so surprises show up in Charc rather than on someone’s Kindle.

Open the collaborators panel from the top bar and invite by email. Four roles: co-authors write alongside you, editors edit but can’t restructure, alpha readers read and leave feedback, viewers just read. The free plan includes 1 co-author, 2 editors, and 5 alpha readers per project; paid plans raise or remove those limits.

You’ll need a verified email to send invitations, since they go out by email.

When collaborators are in the same project you see live presence — who is here, and which scene they’re in. The scene someone else is actively writing in is locked for you until they move on, which prevents two people silently overwriting each other mid-sentence.

Each writer works in their own working copy, and Charc merges changes scene by scene — your collaborator’s edits never silently overwrite yours. The Changes panel (clock icon, top bar) shows every edit with who made it, split into Manuscript and Structural changes, and anything conflicting is presented for review rather than auto-resolved.

A clean reading view of the manuscript plus the Progress overview — no outline, no notes, no settings. They can leave feedback and answer the questions you attach to scenes, and that’s the entire surface: your planning stays private.

Yes. Publish a project as a work-in-progress on your writer profile and it gets a public reading link — a clean, read-only page anyone can open with no account and no app. Unpublish any time and the link stops working.

Every account can enable a profile at charc.app/@yourhandle: your name, bio, writing activity, and the works-in-progress you choose to showcase. Nothing is public unless you publish it — the profile is off until you set it up on the account page.

Click the account menu in the top navigation bar and select Preferences. The main themes are Daylight (clean white), Moonlight (dark grey + blue), Ember (dark amber), and Lavender (warm paper + indigo). Additional themes — Midnight, Forest, Parchment, Slate, Steampunk, and Operator — are also available in the picker.

Charc can generate looping ambient audio — a blend of fire, paper, and atmospheric noise — to help you focus while writing. Click the flame icon in the top navigation to open the ambient panel.

Appearance in Charc is three layers, each overriding the one before it:

1. Defaults — the look Charc ships with.
2. Theme — overrides the defaults. Picking a theme in Preferences → General restyles everything at once.
3. Your own settings — everything on the Custom Appearance tab overrides the theme.

The practical consequence is the useful bit: a theme only restyles the pieces you haven't set yourself. If you pick a custom page color and then switch themes, your page color stays — deliberately, so a theme change never quietly undoes your work.

Because you have set that piece yourself, and your own settings sit above the theme. It's the layering above doing exactly what it should — but it does mean a stray setting from months ago can make a new theme look half-applied.

The fix: open Preferences → Custom Appearance. Every control there has a Theme option — choosing it hands that piece back to the theme. To hand everything back at once, use Reset to defaults at the bottom of that tab. Your projects and writing are never affected by any of this.

The Custom Appearance tab in Preferences covers accent color, heading / navigation / monospace fonts, background tint, page and page-surround colors, navigation color, revision color, the fonts, sizes and colors of act, chapter and scene labels, scene titles, and the block and progress typography. Preferences → General separately holds your theme, UI text size and UI font.

Once you have a combination you like, Save current at the top of the tab stores it as a named theme of your own, so you can jump back to it later.

Yes, if you're signed in. Your theme and appearance settings save with your account alongside your projects, so signing in on another machine brings your setup with you. Without an account they live in that browser only.

Yes. Without an account, all data stays in your browser and never leaves your device. With an account, your projects are encrypted in transit and stored securely. We do not read your manuscript, and we never sell or share your data with third parties.

We are straight with you about the one exception: while Charc is young, we do look at basic activity data to work out what to build and fix. See the next question for exactly what that means.

Charc is built by a very small team, and at this stage we watch how the app is actually used so we can find bugs and decide what to build next. Being specific about that matters more than sounding reassuring, so here is the whole list.

What we can see: when you signed up and when you last wrote, how many words you've written and on which days, your project and scene titles, word counts and progress figures, which features you've opened, what device and browser you're on, and technical error reports when something breaks.

What we do not do: we do not read the text of your manuscript. We do not sell your data, share it with third parties, or feed it to anyone's AI training. Nothing you write is used to train a model.

Most of this is data the app has to store anyway to show you your own word counts and streaks. We look at it in aggregate, and occasionally at a single account when someone reports a problem we can't reproduce. If that isn't for you, Charc works fully without an account — in that mode nothing leaves your browser at all.

Yes, and it genuinely helps. Under Account → About you there are two optional fields: gender and year of birth. Knowing roughly who is writing in Charc tells us who we're building for — a tool used mostly by teenagers writing fanfiction should grow differently from one used mostly by retired historians.

Both fields are optional, blank by default, and private. They are never shown on your public profile, never attached to anything you publish, and only ever used in aggregate. You can clear them at any time, and deleting your account deletes them with it.

Yes, with a free account. Sign in on any device and your projects sync automatically. That includes your phone: open charc.app in the phone's browser, sign in with the same email and password, and your manuscript is there. (If the app looks empty on a new device, it means you're not signed in yet — nothing is lost.)

Without an account, projects only exist in the browser they were created in.

Charc runs in mobile browsers but is optimised for desktop use. The layout and editing experience work best on a larger screen with a keyboard. A dedicated mobile app is on the roadmap.

Yes, within limits. The editor keeps working through a dropped connection — your writing saves locally and syncs when you’re back online, and the sync indicator shows the state. DOCX and manuscript-PDF export work offline via browser fallbacks; EPUB and the page-perfect PDF renders need a connection.

Layers. Your work syncs continuously to the cloud; automatic scene history and snapshots cover the in-app timeline; the server keeps its own replicated backups. On top of that you can export a .charc backup of any project from the export dialog — a single file that restores completely via New Project → import. For anything you’d hate to lose, an occasional .charc export is cheap insurance.

We send a short notice when your account is signed in to from a device or network we haven't seen before. Nine times out of ten it's simply you — a new browser, your phone, or your home internet switching between connection paths, which can look like a new place from the outside.

If it was you, there's nothing to do. If you don't recognize it, change your password on the account page — and you can reply to the email itself; a person reads those.

A deleted project moves to Recently Deleted for 30 days before being permanently removed, so an accidental delete is recoverable. Deleting your account is immediate and permanent — your projects and history go with it and we cannot restore them.

If you're leaving, export your manuscripts first (DOCX or a .charc backup takes seconds) — they're yours.