A tour of Skribisto

What a book looks like inside Skribisto: how you arrange it, how you write it, how you look at it, and how it gets out.

1. Your project

A project opens on a binder: the list down the side holding your book, its chapters and its scenes.

One project is not one book. You can write several in the same project, and you can keep more than one binder, so a manuscript, a story bible and a heap of research do not have to share a tree.

Inside a binder you decide how much structure you want. A book can go straight to its chapters or through parts first. A chapter can be a folder holding scenes, or a single page you write straight down, and both kinds can sit in the same book. Notes and note folders go wherever you need them: a character, a place, a page of research.

Nothing is set in stone. Move a scene, indent it, gather a run of scenes into a chapter, turn a scene into a note or a flat chapter into a folder of scenes: the writing comes with it, and the book keeps its shape.

And when you want to read rather than arrange, a chapter, a part or a whole book opens as one continuous page, as do all of its summaries.

2. Write

Every piece of writing carries two things: the text, and a short summary of what happens in it. The summary sits in a box above the page, or in a column beside it if you would rather read one against the other. Each has its own typeface, size, line spacing and indent, because a summary is not read the way a scene is.

Around that:

• Distraction-free mode, with its own colour themes, for when the rest of the interface is in the way.
• Replace-while-typing, in two layers: your own list of abbreviations and habitual typos, and punctuation that follows the language you are writing in, with curly quotes, dashes, ellipses, French spacing, guillemets and dialogue dashes.
• Spell checking, with dictionaries you download from inside the application and a word list of your own.
• Footnotes, numbered from the manuscript rather than stored, so adding one in chapter two does not leave chapter nine wrong.
• Images in the text, whether a map, a face or a photograph of a street, kept inside the project and carried through every export, plus a cover for the book.
• Note templates: character sheet, location, object, beat sheet, faction, research note, or your own, saved from any note you have written.

3. Look at it

A book is easier to write when you can stand back from it.

• Corkboard. The summaries of a chapter or a part as cards you can read, edit and reorder.
• Overview. A table of everything below a folder: title, type, label, tags, its own words, its total words, open comments.
• Analysis. Words per scene, how much of the book is dialogue, and how many words sit in the footnotes, measured against the book’s own numbers rather than against somebody’s idea of a norm.
• Pace. A plan with a deadline, milestones and the days you are not writing, against the words you actually wrote.
• Comments. Anchored in the margin, the way a word processor does it, with threaded replies, a dock for the whole project and one for the document in front of you.
• Tags and point of view. Colour tags with ready-made sets by genre, and the character whose eyes a scene is seen through.

4. The story bible

A bible entry is not a new kind of thing: it is a note, with a colour tag, a few aliases and whatever you write in it. What makes it a bible is that Skribisto reads the manuscript back to you through it.

• Make one from the prose. Select the name you just invented, pick its tag, and it becomes a filed note in one click, in the folder that tag files things into, from the template that tag uses.
• A place for them. Any folder of notes gets a story-bible view: cards grouped by tag, each with its aliases and the number of scenes it appears in. With more than one book in the project, entries can be filed under a book, or under none.
• Every entry is three pages. The note itself; Details, which puts what you are stating on the left and what you have already written about them on the right, quoted from your own manuscript; and In prose, the scenes that entry is declared present in, editable there rather than somewhere else.
• Names are marked where they are written. A mentioned character is washed in their own colour in the prose, counted in the page header, and stepped through in reading order, aliases included, so “Lizzy” is not walked past on the way to “Elizabeth”.

5. Lose nothing

The whole point of a manuscript is that it survives. Four layers, none of which you have to remember to use.

• It saves as you write, and tells you at a glance whether what is on the screen has been written down.
• The trash restores, and the restore is undoable, as is everything else the binder does.
• Backups with a retention policy, several destinations and a scheduler, taken on a schedule and when you close a project. Any backup opens read-only, so you can read last month’s draft with today’s still open.
• Version history. What a scene said last Tuesday, read out of the backups you already have and out of the project’s own save history, with the differences marked and the old words put back if that is what you decide. A project timeline shows the same thing for the whole book, so you can find the day a chapter changed.

6. Finish

Skribisto is not a word processor and does not try to be. What it does is hand the book over already laid out the way the people receiving it expect.

• The conventions of the place you are sending it. A project can be laid out from the start with the front and back matter its tradition expects: a US trade novel, a UK trade novel, un roman français, ein deutscher Roman, each in that tradition’s own words. Afterwards they are ordinary items, so move them, rename them or throw them away.
• Nine formats: DOCX, ODT, EPUB, PDF, HTML, Markdown, Djot, LaTeX and plain text, with a live preview of what will come out and a saved style per format: page size and margins, the typeface, its size, the line spacing, the indents, where a chapter starts, how a scene break is drawn, whether the title page carries a word count.
• The editorial round trip closes. Send a chapter out as DOCX or ODT, get it back marked up, and it comes home to the book it left instead of landing beside it as a second copy. Every item is recognised by a round-trip marker carried inside the file, along with the wording as it was sent, so the comparison can tell who changed what.
• You decide item by item what comes back. The Merge step puts your own tree on one side and what the file says about each item on the other, including the chapter your editor inserted where you had nothing. For each one: Take this version, Keep mine, Comments only, Add as new or Skip, with Compare when you want to look before you choose. Comments only is the case it exists for, since it brings an editor’s remarks home without re-importing ninety thousand words.
• Your project, without Skribisto. A .skrib file is a zip of Djot files, which are plain text much like Markdown, plus readable manifests. Keep it as one file, or as an exploded folder if the manuscript lives in git. Open a scene in any text editor and it is your prose, with your images in a folder beside it.

7. Accessible on purpose

An interface a screen reader cannot drive is not finished, it is finished for some people. Skribisto exposes a real accessibility tree, which is what a screen reader reads. It is tested with NVDA, with JAWS, and on a braille display, because a tree that reads well aloud can still come out as nonsense under the fingers. Everything can be reached from the keyboard, and the places where it could not have been found by working through the whole application with the keyboard alone. Each of them is now checked automatically, so it cannot quietly come back.

None of that makes the application perfect. If you hit a barrier, report it: it is a bug like any other, and it is treated like one.