Features

Build novels in the shape of novels

Your manuscript isn't a single document or a folder of unrelated files — it's a tree. SceneWeaver mirrors that. Add chapters, drop scenes inside them, split a long scene into sections, drag things around as the story finds its shape. Word counts roll up automatically from each scene to its chapter to the whole work, so you always know where you are without doing any math.

One file is your project. A SceneWeaver manuscript lives in a single portable file. Email it to yourself, drop it on a USB stick, back it up to whatever cloud you already trust — no accounts, no sync service, no lock-in. If you change machines, you copy one file.

Typewriter mode keeps the line you're writing locked to the middle of the screen, so your eyes don't have to chase the cursor down the page. And SceneWeaver remembers where it last was — window position, panel layout, which manuscript was open — so the next session resumes exactly where you stopped.

Keep your cast and your continuity straight

By chapter twenty, you've named forty people, three rival factions, a cursed sword, and a city with five districts. SceneWeaver lets you treat all of them as proper entities, not just text — characters, items, locations, and organisations all get their own records that the app understands.

That means when you open a scene, the Entity Usage panel tells you who and what is in it. When you wonder "did I ever mention the dagger before chapter fifteen?", the answer is one click away. And when two characters share a first name and the app can't be sure which "Brennan" you meant, it asks you instead of guessing — that's merge-token disambiguation, and it stops continuity bugs before they reach a reader.

Know your manuscript better than you do

Most writing tools count words. SceneWeaver also reads what's there and tells you about it.

The Statistics & Readability report gives you average sentence length, reading level, and pacing indicators at scene, chapter, or whole-manuscript scope. The Repeated Phrases report finds the verbal tics that creep into any long work — the transitions you reach for, the verbs you over-use — and shows them in seconds, so you can keep the ones that are voice and fix the ones that are habit.

The Sentence Breakdown report visualises sentence-length variation, useful when a scene reads flat and you can't tell why. The Entity Usage report shows you how often each character appears, where, and in what proportion — handy when a "main" character has gone missing for fifty pages. Data Quality & Completeness flags missing descriptions, orphaned entities, and structural gaps that would otherwise only turn up at copy-edit. And the Writing Coach dashboard pulls progress, pacing, and quality signals into one view so you can see at a glance whether today's session was a good one.

Add fast in-editor Search and Replace and you can answer "is this true everywhere in the book?" without leaving the writing.

Ship to whoever asks for it

Different readers want different formats. Agents want DOCX, publishers want PDF, screenwriting readers want Fountain, journals want LaTeX, your beta-reader friend wants plain text on the train. SceneWeaver exports to all of them — DOCX, PDF, EPUB, HTML, Markdown, plain text, Fountain, and LaTeX — with print preview for the formats that have a page.

Compile Presets remember your favourite combinations (which chapters, which formatting, which output) so you configure each destination once and re-run it with one click whenever you have a fresh draft to send.

The full feature set always exports the full manuscript. No watermarks, no lock-in, no "upgrade to remove this footer." Your text is your text.

Never lose what you wrote

Writing is editing, and editing means breaking things and putting them back together. SceneWeaver assumes you'll want to undo decisions you can't see yet.

Restore Points are named snapshots you take whenever you're about to do something big — a structural rewrite, a POV change, cutting a subplot. They survive app restarts. The Snapshot Comparison Viewer shows you exactly what changed between a restore point and the current version, so going back isn't a leap of faith.

Writing Targets and Progress Tracking let you set per-day and per-project word goals and watch yourself move toward them — gentle measurement, not nagging. And every session displays the exact application version and build you're running, so if you ever need to report something, you know precisely what produced it.

Your manuscript stays yours

SceneWeaver is local-first by design, not by accident. No account to create, no sign-in, no sync service watching your typing. Open the app, your manuscript is there. Close it, your manuscript is still on your disk and nowhere else. If our infrastructure vanished tomorrow, SceneWeaver still fully works, because it never needed our infrastructure in the first place.

Your writing never leaves your machine — not as content, not as metadata, not even anonymised. That promise is unconditional and covers everything you wrote: prose, entity names, citations, annotations, exports. Nothing of it is transmitted, ever.

What is available, if you choose to turn it on, is opt-in feedback: bug reports and anonymous usage telemetry, both off by default. SceneWeaver is free in exchange for the option of that feedback — if a feature is misbehaving or quietly unused, we'd like to know, so the app gets better for everyone. You decide whether to send any of it, and whichever channel you enable, the manuscript content stays on your disk.

A home for the material behind your novel

Novels are held together by research the reader never sees. The Research Library gives that material a proper home: folders of notes, images, saved links (with their reader-mode text captured for offline reference), quotations, and imported PDF or RTF documents. Every item can be bound to a specific scene, chapter, or entity so the moment you reopen a scene, the reference behind it is one click away.

Images live throughout the manuscript. Drop one into a scene body and it exports inline through DOCX, EPUB, PDF, HTML, Markdown, and LaTeX. Attach images to a character record for a face and a wardrobe, to a location record for a floor plan, or as chapter background watermarks and cover artwork. The whole image library travels inside the manuscript file — no external folder dependencies to break.

The book itself, not just the manuscript

Special chapter types mirror how real books are laid out: front cover, title page, dedication, acknowledgements, epigraph, about-the-author, back cover. Each type carries its own pagination rules — cover pages don't show page numbers, chapters begin on the correct page side, the exporter handles the section-break dance for you.

Built-in tokens insert manuscript metadata (title, author, chapter number, ISBN, publisher) or front-and-back-matter fields (dedication, acknowledgements, epigraph, about-the-author) into your prose. Set them once in Preferences and every export renders them consistently. Combined with background watermarks — per chapter, scene, or section, whichever is the lowest level used — the exported document reads and looks like a finished book, not a Word document with paragraphs in it.

Prose that maintains itself

Convert to Token. Right-click any character or location mention in your prose and turn it into a merge token. Rename the entity later and every previously-typed mention updates with it. The reverse works too: convert a token back to plain text when you want a one-off wording that shouldn't follow the entity.

Inline annotations. Anchor a note to a specific span of text — a passage that needs a rewrite, a query for a beta reader, a reminder to check a fact. The Notes panel lists them all with jump-to-source.

Grammar highlighting. Optional grammar checking via LanguageTool. Green underlines appear alongside the red spelling underlines without either erasing the other, so you can see spelling and grammar issues at the same time. LanguageTool installs via a one-touch button inside the app — no external Java hunt if none is present on your machine.

Themes. Light, dark, and mid-tone palettes for whichever writing environment fits the room you're in.