Chapter 9 · The Editor
A Tour of the Editor
The editor is one screen with five horizontal bands and three columns, and every part of it stays in the same place all day. This chapter names each piece so the rest of Part III can stop describing where things are and get on with what they do.
Five bands, top to bottom
| Band | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Document bar | Back arrow, document title, word count, save state, and the Share, Versions and Export menus. |
| Ribbon tabs | Home, one tab that depends on your format, Review, View. |
| Ribbon | The buttons belonging to the selected tab. |
| The three columns | Navigator on the left, manuscript in the middle, findings rail on the right. |
| Status bar | Counts, current page, session progress, daily goal, and where this document lives. |
Focus Mode hides four of the five and leaves you the manuscript, which is a chapter of its own later in this Part.
The document bar
The ← button on the far left goes back to the project. Beside it, the document title is an editable field: click it and type, and the new name saves like anything else.
Two small readouts sit to its right. The first is the running count, which reads 1,204 words for prose and adds ~14 pp for a screenplay or ~6 min for a video script or audio drama. The second is the save state, which normally reads Saved and changes to Saving…, Unsaved, or a line telling you it is offline and will retry. That slot is also where the editor says why a button did nothing, with messages like Put the cursor on a character cue first. Watch it when a click seems to be ignored.
Then the menus. Share ▾ and Versions ▾ appear when the document is yours. Share creates a reviewer link, which suggests and comments, or an editor link with full edit rights, and lists the links already out. Versions holds Save version… and the list to restore from, which is Chapter 7.
Export ▾ is there for everyone with access: Word, Rich text, OpenDocument, Web page, Typeset PDF, a watermarked draft PDF and plain text, plus Final Draft and Fountain for a screenplay and an ebook for a novel. Getting work out is Part VIII.
If somebody shared this document with you, a chip appears here instead of Share and Versions, naming your role and whose document it is.
The ribbon tabs
Four tabs, and the third one depends on what you are writing:
| Format | Third tab | What is on it |
|---|---|---|
| Novel | Insert | Image, Table, table editing, Page Break, Scene Break, Footnote, and a Symbol menu. |
| Screenplay | Script | Scene numbers, UK TV style, Title Page, dual dialogue, Rename Character, alternate takes, page locking, revisions, Omit Scene, Reports, Breakdown, Highlight Cast, and structure bands. |
| Stage play | Elements | Title Page, Play Setup, and Simultaneous for two characters speaking at once. |
| Video script | Timing | Reading rate in words per minute, row duration, Teleprompter, and the total running time. |
| Audio drama | Elements | Spoken rate and the Reports button for the cue sheet, casting and runtime. |
The tab you leave selected is remembered for each format, so a screenplay can sit on Script while a novel sits on Home.
Home
Undo and redo sit at the left of every format. What follows them depends on the document.
A novel gets typeface, size and line spacing, a case menu, clear formatting, the usual bold, italic, underline and strikethrough with subscript and superscript, a highlighter with five colours, a text colour with nine, alignment, lists, block quote, outdent, a scene-break mark, and a style gallery of Body, Chapter, Section and Subsec.
A script format replaces the typography controls with an element list, because the layout is decided by the element rather than by you. A screenplay's list carries its keyboard numbers beside each name, plus a character extension menu and a switch between single-camera and multi-camera layout. The hint line under it reads Tab cycles · Enter advances · tinted = not printed. Those elements are Part IV.
Find and replace lives at the far right of Home on every format, and answers ⌘F.
Review
Your staff live here, and so does everything a second pair of eyes does: New Comment, a Suggest checkbox that turns your edits into tracked changes, Check Facts, Continuity, Research, Insights, and a read-aloud button labelled Table Read on a screenplay. Findings land in the rail on the right rather than in your text, and nothing on this tab writes a sentence for you.
View
Zoom from 90% to 150%, Focus Mode, Typewriter to keep the cursor vertically centred, and Dark. A novel adds Auto-headings and Manuscript pages, a labelled estimate at 250 words per page. A video script adds the two-column script and a timecode column. If the document is yours, Reference opens a second pane beside the draft for another document or something off the research shelf. At the right sit Print / PDF and Shortcuts, which is the authoritative key list for the format you are in.
Navigator, manuscript, rail
The left column is headed Scenes in a screenplay and Outline everywhere else. It fills itself from the document, listing headings and detected chapters with a word count beside each. Click an entry to jump. A detected chapter that is not yet a real heading carries a small +H button to promote it. The Beat board → button at the bottom opens the project outline.
The middle column is the manuscript. Press Esc to leave it and land on the ribbon tabs, then use the arrow keys between tabs. This matters because Tab inside the editor changes the element type instead of moving focus.
The right column is the findings rail, with five tabs: Facts, Continuity, Comments, Codex and Changes. Facts and Continuity keep their results separately, so a continuity pass does not throw away a fact check you are still working through. Codex gives you + Add from selection for putting a highlighted name straight into the story bible. On a narrow screen the rail becomes a sheet from the bottom: tapping its tab raises it, tapping the same tab again lowers it.
The status bar
Left to right: the word count, with pages for a screenplay and minutes for a video script; the current position as Page 4 of 31; your session change as session +740; and Set daily goal. Click that, type a number, and it becomes a progress bar reading 740/1000 (74%). The day's baseline is set the first time you open a document that day, so the goal measures today rather than the life of the manuscript. Clear it by leaving the box empty.
Screenplays are paginated in true Courier pages. Every other format draws page lines on screen and counts those, which is why a novel's page figure moves when you change type size and the manuscript-page estimate does not.
At the right-hand end is the storage chip, which says where this document lives: ✓ saved to Dropbox › Apps/Skarvia/My Novel, or Saved on this computer ✓ with the folder, or ⚠ choose where this doc lives when you have not picked yet. Click it to open the storage dialog from Chapter 3.
When something is wrong
Three states are worth recognising on sight.
- A banner across the top. If Dropbox or Google Drive has stopped accepting your work, a warning strip appears with a Reconnect button and a Save somewhere else escape hatch. Your recent changes are safe on Skarvia while it says so; they are not reaching your cloud. A local folder gets the same strip with Choose a folder.
- The chip reads "name already taken". A file another document wrote already sits at that path, and Skarvia will neither adopt nor overwrite it. Give this document a different name or folder. Chapter 8 goes further.
- Formatting buttons are greyed out. You are in the document as a reviewer. Their tooltip says so: reviewers suggest and comment, the owner formats and restructures. Ask the owner for an editor link. Roles are Part VII.
Next comes the keyboard, which is the same tour with your hands on the keys instead of the mouse.
Updated 2026-08-16 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?