A manuscript is only part of a project.
Behind every draft is a layer of knowledge the reader never sees directly: who the characters are and what drives them, what a place looks like and what it means, how a world’s rules work, what you’ve researched and what you still need to check. That layer needs somewhere to live — close enough to reach while you’re writing, deep enough to hold real depth.
In Charc, that’s the entity tabs.
Everything that feeds the manuscript
The entity tabs — Characters, Setting, and any custom tabs you add — are a structured knowledge base attached to your project. They don’t appear in exports by default, but they can be included if you want them: character sheets and world notes can be appended to an export as reference material. Most writers leave them out of the final document and use them purely as a writing aid.
What they’re for is keeping everything your manuscript needs — backstory, appearance, motivation, history, lore — organized, searchable, and always one click away.
Characters and setting
The Characters and Setting tabs share the same structure. When you open either one, you’re looking at a three-column layout: a list of entries in the left sidebar, a section navigation panel in the middle, and the main content area on the right.
Click any entry in the sidebar to open its page. The content area shows everything you’ve written about that character or place, organized into blocks (more on those in a moment). The section navigation panel in the middle shows the blocks for the current entry as a quick-jump list — useful once a character page gets long.
To add a new character or place, click “+ Add entry” at the bottom of the left sidebar. The entry gets a default name you can edit immediately. There’s also a tag field beneath the name — use it for a role, a type, a status, whatever is most useful to you. A small icon to the left of the name can be clicked to assign a color, which tints the entry’s icon throughout the app.
Deleting an entry doesn’t permanently remove it. Like everything else in Charc, it goes to the Scrap Pile, where it can be restored.
The block system
Entity pages aren’t a fixed form. They’re built from blocks — discrete, labeled units of content that you can add, remove, reorder, and stack however your project needs.
There are five block types:
Fields — a structured grid of labeled text inputs. This is what the default Character Sketch and Setting Sketch blocks use. Each field has a label (Overview, Appearance, Personality, Motivation, Arc, Notes for characters; Overview, Atmosphere, History, Geography, Notes for settings) and a freeform text value. You can edit the field labels, add new fields, and remove ones you don’t use.
Text — a freeform rich text block with its own label. Use it for extended notes, backstory, research, anything that needs more than a short field value. Text blocks have an inline editor for quick edits and a full-screen editor for longer work (described in the next section).
Image — a single image, uploaded from your device. Useful for character references, maps, location photos, mood board images.
Chart — embeds a chart or table from the Charts tab. Pin a character relationship matrix or a scene breakdown directly to the character page it belongs to.
Divider — a horizontal rule for visual separation between sections on a long page.
To add a block, click the “+ Add block” button that appears at the top or bottom of any entity page. A small picker lets you choose the type. Blocks can be dragged to reorder. Right-clicking a block gives you options to rename it, pin it to the reference panel, or send it to the Scrap Pile.
Text blocks and the document editor
Text blocks have two modes. In the entity page view, the block renders as an inline rich text editor — click in and start typing, same toolbar as the Manuscript. This works well for notes that are a paragraph or two.
For longer writing — extended backstory, detailed world history, deep character analysis — click the expand icon (⤢) in the top-right corner of the block. This opens the document editor: a full-screen writing surface with the same rich text toolbar, a document name field at the top, a live word count, and a print button for a clean single-document printout. The back button (‹ Back) returns you to the entity tab, and everything is saved automatically as you write.
The document editor is available from entity tabs and also from the Write tab — any text block pinned to the Reference panel can be opened into it from there.
Custom entity tabs
Characters and Setting are built-in, but your project may need more. A magic system. A faction list. A research archive. A glossary of invented terms. Custom entity tabs are exactly what they sound like: additional tabs you create, using the same block system as Characters and Setting.
To add one, click the “+” button at the right end of the tab bar. A picker appears with four preset templates — Research, Magic, Religion, Symbolism — each with a starting block structure suited to that kind of content. There’s also a Custom option if none of the presets fit, where you name the tab yourself and start from a blank page.
Custom tabs behave identically to the built-in ones: sidebar list, section nav, content area, full block system. Right-click a custom tab’s name to rename it. The tab and all its entries go to the Scrap Pile if you remove it — nothing is permanently deleted.
Pinning to the reference panel
Every block, every outline node, every scene, every chart, every scrap item in Charc has a pin button. For entity blocks it’s the 📌 icon in the block header. For outline nodes and scenes, it appears in the node’s action buttons. For charts, it’s in the Charts inspector.
Pinning something adds it to the Reference panel — a collapsible panel on the right side of the Write tab that stays visible while you write.
To open the Reference panel, switch to the Write tab and click the two-column icon in the top-right toolbar (to the right of the Page view button). The panel slides in from the right. It’s resizable — drag its left edge to give it more or less space.
The reference panel in full
Once you have content pinned, the Reference panel shows each item as a collapsible block with a title, a type icon, and a content area. Click a block header to expand or collapse it. Use the expand/collapse all toggle at the top of the panel to show or hide everything at once.
You can also add freeform notes directly in the panel itself — click the “+” button in the panel header to create a note block. Each note is a real document: it appears under Papers, can be opened in the full editor, and stays there if you later unpin it from the panel. Use them for things like writing-session reminders, questions to resolve, or anything else you want visible while you draft.
The panel persists across sessions. Pin something once and it stays there every time you open the project.
Snapshot comparison — The Reference panel is also where snapshot comparison lives. Pin a snapshot to the panel (from the Drafting sidebar on the left of the Write tab) and it appears as a compare block. Open it to see your current scene text alongside the snapshot version. Toggle the Compare mode to get a word-level diff: added text highlighted in one color, removed text in another. This makes it easy to see exactly what changed between a draft and an earlier version without leaving the editor.
Collaborator draft comparison works the same way. If you’re working on a shared project, collaborator drafts appear in the Drafting sidebar and can be pinned to the Reference panel for a side-by-side read — with the same word diff available.
The loop
Put it all together and the workflow looks like this: you build your characters and world in the entity tabs, writing as much or as little depth as your project needs. When you sit down to write a scene, you open the Reference panel, pin the characters who appear in it and the outline node for the scene, and start drafting with everything visible on the right. When you want to check whether you’ve drifted from an earlier version, you pin a snapshot and run a compare.
The manuscript is the output. The entity tabs are the foundation it rests on.