Quilva — Help Guide

A complete guide to everything in Quilva: the workspace philosophy, every tab, settings, the authorship certificate, shortcuts, and the full Dynamic Text code reference.

Getting Started

Quilva is a focused, self-contained creative workspace for writers working on longer, more complex projects. The whole studio — outline, cards, world bible, research, manuscript, and final design — lives in one portable project file (.qlv). Every part of the application knows about every other part: move a scene in the Outliner and it moves everywhere else at once.

Choosing Your Edition

Quilva is one application with four ways to run it. Crucially, every one of them uses the same project file format — you can begin in Demo mode today and upgrade in a year without losing a single word, note, or card.

Demo Mode

On first launch Quilva runs in Demo mode with no time limit and no expiry. You can start real projects immediately. The only restrictions are a limit of twenty scenes per project and watermarked PDF exports. If your project is small and you don't mind a watermark (or you export to Word instead), Demo mode is a permanent, no-cost way to use Quilva's card-based and timeline planning.

The Free Trial

Request a free Trial key from quilva.com — no credit card, no commitment. The Trial unlocks the full Standard or Pro experience and is usage-based rather than time-based: you get a set number of sessions (typically fifteen) to evaluate everything without a countdown clock. Need more? Contact support — the team is generous about extensions.

Standard Edition

A one-time purchase. Includes the complete Writer, Planner, Timeline, Bubbles, full screenplay support, and a solid basic Publisher — everything a writer who "just wants to write" needs. No watermarks, no limits.

Pro Edition

Everything in Standard, plus the professional Designer for book layout, advanced publishing, Card Stack templates, the clipart and font library, priority support, and the Human Authorship Certificate. Pro is for writers taking the book all the way to press-ready themselves.

Installation & Portability

Quilva runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with the same features on every platform. It needs roughly 350 MB of disk space and 8 GB of RAM recommended. Download it from quilva.com.

• Windows: a standard install wizard (includes the EULA agreement). Default options are usually fine.
• macOS: Quilva ships as a single portable folder (download the .zip and unzip it anywhere — Applications, Desktop, an external drive). See the macOS note below for first-launch guidance.
• Linux: a self-contained executable; make it executable with chmod +x (tested on Ubuntu 20.04+).

You do not need to install Quilva into system folders. A common workflow is keeping both the application and the projects on a single USB drive, so the whole studio travels between machines. Because every project is one portable file, backups and sharing are trivial. To activate a purchase, open License Manager from the Welcome screen or Help → License Manager, enter your key, and click Activate License.

Creating Your First Project

Launch Quilva and choose New Project (File → New). Pick a name and a location. That single file becomes your entire workspace. Every project follows a four-level hierarchy with flexible terminology you can rename later in Settings:

You write full prose or screenplay text only at the Writing Unit level. When you select a higher level in the Outliner while in the Writer tab, the main area becomes an index-card overview of that level's children — a Book shows cards for its Parts, a Part shows its Chapters, a Chapter shows its Scenes.

The Main Interface

Tabs across the top give different ways into the same project: Writer, Planner, Atlas, Timeline, Bubbles, Sources, Designer, Publisher, and Settings. The Outliner sits on the left and is the structural spine (toggle with Ctrl+Q). Most tabs also have a right-hand sidebar (toggle with Ctrl+W) that adapts to your current selection. The menu bar also carries a Writing menu that gathers the writer-focused commands in one place — Retreat Mode, the Compass Editor, Writing Goals, Show Comments, and the Display submenu — and a Module menu that lets you switch tabs even when the tab bar is hidden.

The Core Idea: A Studio, Not a Document

A large creative work is not a linear document — it is a network. Characters connect to scenes. Scenes connect to beats. Beats connect to research. A revelation in chapter twenty-two depends on a seed planted in chapter three. Most software treats a book as a long string of characters; Quilva treats it as the network it actually is, and maintains that web for you.

When the network is real and maintained for you, several things stop being problems:

• Planning survives contact with the blank page, because the Compass carries it onto the page with you.
• Restructuring becomes spatial and fast rather than tedious and risky.
• Continuity becomes something you can see rather than something you hope you remembered.
• Research stays attached to the part of the story it serves.
• You move freely between structural, visual, chronological, and textual thinking without losing your place.
• The whole project stays portable, self-contained, and entirely yours.

Settings: Making Quilva Your Own

Settings is where Quilva adapts to you. The tab sits at the far right of the tab bar, organised into three columns. Changes take effect in the current session immediately but become permanent only when you click Save Settings at the bottom. Until you save, experiment freely.

Column One — General & Terminology

General interface defaults decide how Quilva looks on launch: which tab opens first (Writer, Planner, Atlas, Timeline, Bubbles, Sources, or Designer), interface font (sans or serif) and its size, and which pieces are shown on start-up — the Toolbar, the Outliner, the Tabs bar, Stats, the Sidebar, and the Welcome screen. Two settings deserve a word:

• Image Max Resolution — the import downscale width, 100 px up to 4K, shared by Sources and the Designer. Lower keeps project files lean; higher preserves detail.
• Atlas Icon size (small, medium, large) — applies everywhere icons appear: Compass, Planner, Atlas, Timeline, and Bubbles.

Project Terminology

All four hierarchy levels can be renamed, and the new terms propagate through the entire application — Outliner, menus, dialogs, Bubbles, Compass, statistics, everywhere.

Column Two — Writer Defaults

Governs the day-to-day writing experience: default mode (book or screenplay), text colour (black or a calm medium grey — deliberately just those two), default book font and size, default screenplay font, default zoom, and whether book mode uses a fixed width.

Scroll Mode

Typewriter scroll moves the page continuously so your cursor holds a fixed, comfortable position and never reaches the bottom — a genuine fatigue reducer. Snap scroll behaves like a traditional word processor, jumping only when the cursor nears the bottom. The Focus drop-down sets where the cursor rests after scrolling (near the top, one third down, halfway, two thirds); for snap scroll, a Trigger value controls how close to the bottom the cursor must drift before the page snaps.

An On Enter option restricts snap scrolling so it fires only when you press Enter, rather than on every cursor move — useful if you find continuous re-centring distracting. Focus offers four resting points (near the top, one third down, halfway, or two thirds down) and the Trigger runs from 50% to 99% of the visible height.

Other Writer Options

• Spellcheck on or off.
• Auto Tab automatically indents the first line of every new paragraph — the standard for printed novels.
• All tools adds the structural controls — headings (H1 and H2), bulleted and numbered lists, tables, and image insertion — to the Book writer's formatting toolbar. Leave it off for a minimal, prose-only toolbar; turn it on when a project needs richer structure. (The Writing menu's Show All Tools flips the same thing for the current session only, without changing this saved default.)
• Page Counting sets words per page (books, default 250) and lines per page (screenplays) so statistics report realistic page estimates at every level.

Publish Folder

Quilva needs a temporary working folder when assembling designed books — a place to mix Writer text with Designer layout into final output. Point it somewhere out of the way (a "temp_publishing" folder in Documents is common). A valid, writable publish folder is required for a successful Designed Book publish, so set it before you need it.

Column Three — Saving & Backups

Auto Save

Enable auto save and choose an interval (1, 5, 10, or 15 minutes). The standout option is "wait for inactivity," a number of seconds (up to 60) Quilva waits for a pause before saving — so it never freezes the interface mid-sentence. Set it to 0 to save strictly on the interval instead.

Backups

• Keep previous save — every save preserves the prior version as a .QLB file (named <project>-previous.QLB), so you always hold the current save and the one before it.
• Incremental backups — keep multiple numbered backups (up to 10), named <project>-backup1.QLB, -backup2.QLB, and so on. When the limit is reached the oldest is deleted and the rest renumbered; the highest number is always the most recent.
• Backup frequency — every 30 minutes, hour, 4 hours, 8 hours, day, 3 days, or week.
• Backup location — the project's own folder by default, or a single custom folder for all projects.

If something ever goes wrong, you restore a backup simply by renaming the .QLB file back to a .qlv extension. No proprietary recovery tool, no cloud dependency.

The Outliner: The Structural Spine

The Outliner is the single source of truth — the central brain that keeps the whole application in harmony. The other tabs are views onto the structure it holds. It appears on the left by default (toggle with Ctrl+Q) and shows the project as a collapsible tree.

Working with the Outliner

To add a new root item, right-click in the Outliner and choose Add Book. Right-click any item to rename, move, delete, or add the next level beneath it. You can also rename by double-clicking, and rearrange everything by drag and drop. Deleting a parent deletes its children — deleting a chapter removes the scenes inside it — so the small up/down arrow and minus buttons at the bottom are there for precise, deliberate control.

The right-click menu in full

Right-clicking an item gives you Edit Name, Add a sibling of the same level, Add a child of the level below, Move Up, Move Down, and Delete. Right-clicking empty space instead offers Add Book and Jot Outline. The Move Up / Move Down entries reorder an item among its siblings without the risk of a drag landing somewhere unintended.

Add Paratext — front and back matter in one step

Right-click a Book (when it has no Paratext yet) and choose Add Paratext to scaffold your front and back matter instantly: Quilva builds a special Paratext act containing a Front Matter chapter (with an opening section) and a Back Matter chapter, all in a single undoable step. The Publisher places Front Matter before the body and Back Matter after it, and keeps both out of the chapter numbering. (See the Designer & Publisher section for how Paratext is used at publish time.)

Adding Structure Rapidly

The Add Items command (Ctrl+E) is context-aware and adds children to the selected item:

• Select a Subdivision (chapter) and a text box appears — type one scene title per line and Quilva creates them all at once.
• Select a Major Division (act) and you can generate a whole set of chapters in one pass.
• It always adds in the direction of children, so what you create depends on what you have selected.

Cards & Stacks from the toolbar

The main vertical toolbar offers Add Card (Ctrl+D), which adds a planning card to the currently selected scene, and Add Stack (Ctrl+G). Cards are the level below scenes — the individual beats and moments — and they belong to the Planner. Stacks are bulk-created groups of cards.

The Jotter — outline at the speed of typing

The Jotter (Ctrl+J, also the Outliner's right-click Jot Outline) is the fastest way to draft a whole structure. Type one title per line and press Tab to step down a level — each tab of indent maps to a level of the hierarchy (Book → Act → Chapter → Scene → Card). Hit Add to Outliner and Quilva builds the entire branch in a single, fully undoable step. You can start mid-hierarchy too: type only chapters and they attach beneath whatever is selected in the Outliner. Pour a synopsis out of your head as an indented list and watch a complete skeleton appear.

Index Cards in the Writer Tab

Select a Writing Unit (scene) and you get the full editor. Select a higher level and the Writer becomes a clean index-card view of that level's immediate children:

• Book view shows a card per Part.
• Part view shows a card per Chapter.
• Chapter view shows a card per Scene.

Each card carries a title (which edits the item's name) and a summary (around 150 words is the sweet spot). Drag to reorder; the Outliner and underlying structure update instantly.

The index-card keyboard flow

The card grid is built for fast keyboard entry. The header card at the top shows the selected level's own title and summary; the cards below are its children. Tab moves from a card's title to its summary, then on to the next card; pressing Tab off the last card's summary creates a brand-new child card and focuses it, so you can keep tabbing to lay out a whole chapter's scenes without touching the mouse. Shift+Tab walks backward without ever creating anything. Each child card carries a drag handle for reordering and a small navigation button that jumps straight to that item in the Outliner; the summary is happiest at around 150 words. Cards are tinted by the scene's status (soft blue for Idea, warm peach for Draft, soft green for Revision, clean white for Final), and Paratext rows carry their own gentle tint so front and back matter are easy to spot.

The Main Toolbar Tools

• Finder (Ctrl+F) — searches the entire project: Writer text, cards, and more.
• Stats Toggle (Ctrl+Y) — shows word counts and estimated page counts inline. Scenes show words, chapters show pages, acts and books show both.
• Numbers Toggle (Ctrl+L) — overlays automatic numbering on the tree: a numbered badge on every chapter and each scene's position within its chapter, shown in the indent gutter. Unpublished scenes (and front/back-matter pages) are skipped from the count, so the numbers match the finished book.
• Jotter (Ctrl+J) — type an indented outline and Quilva builds the whole structure in one step (see above).
• Status Tracking — every scene version carries a status with consistent colour coding.
• Quick Publish (Ctrl+P) — instant PDF of the current Outliner selection, without opening the Designer.

These colours are consistent everywhere the scene appears — index cards, Outliner rows when Stats is on, and beyond. When you move a scene or chapter here, the Planner, Bubbles, Timeline, Compass, and Designer all reflect the change immediately. Nothing becomes orphaned.

The Planner: Card-Based Story Development

If the Outliner is the skeleton, the Planner is where the story starts to breathe — hundreds of coloured cards spread across a giant table. Cards are the fundamental unit of planning, living one level below scenes. Each represents a single beat, moment, idea, or detail.

The Workspace

Each scene appears as a compact box — a "wallet" — holding the cards that currently belong to it, with a small icon that jumps straight to that scene in the Writer. On the right is the Work Area: a free-form idea space toggled with Ctrl+W. Create named boxes ("Main Plot," "Character Arc," "Subplot A"), drag them around, and treat the whole space as a thinking zone. There is a special Uncategorised box for floating ideas.

Creating & Working with Cards

To create a card: right-click inside a scene box or the Work Area and choose Add Card, or use Add Card (Ctrl+D) on the toolbar. To edit one, double-click it (fastest) or right-click → Edit Card. Each card carries:

• Rich text of any length (bold, italic, lists).
• A theme colour — ten vivid choices, and your single most powerful organising tool.
• An icon — from the built-in set, or an Atlas icon where a tag has one.
• Tags — a comma-separated list that connects the card to the Atlas.
• An attached image, and a status.

Assign colours meaningfully and they become a language you read at a glance: red for high tension, gold for major turning points, cool blue for quiet reflection. Filter the whole Planner by colour, icon, tag, or text to isolate one thread across an entire book.

The Card Editor

Double-clicking a card (or right-click → Edit Card) opens an editor centred over the card itself. The left side is the rich-text body with Bold (Ctrl+B) and Italic (Ctrl+I); the right side holds the Tags field (comma-separated), an icon picker, and a grid of the ten theme colours that recolours the preview live as you click. Saving the editor refreshes the Atlas, so any new tag you typed is picked up immediately.

Filtering, and the two view toggles

The filter row across the top combines a text box ("Filter Cards") with Any tag, Any icon, and Any colour selectors, plus Filter and Clear. Two switches change what the board shows rather than what it hides: Show summaries prints each scene's (and its chapter's and act's) summary right on the board, and Show tags displays the Atlas tag-pills beneath each scene so you can read a thread at a glance.

Selecting several cards at once

Cards select like files in a file manager: Ctrl-click to add individual cards to a selection, Shift-click to select a run, then drag, recolour, or re-tag the whole group together.

Organising, Moving & Weaving

Drag cards freely between scenes, between chapters, into the Work Area and back. Right-click a scene and choose Empty Cards to pull all its cards into the Work Area at once — invaluable when a scene is not working: rescue every good beat, delete the broken scene, and reweave the beats elsewhere.

The Planner also offers the same Merge and Split operations as Bubbles. Select two or more siblings of the same level and right-click Merge to fold them into the first; or right-click a single act or chapter that has two or more children and choose Split… to divide its children across several new acts or chapters. As everywhere in Quilva, both are fully undoable and update every other view at once.

Right-click menus on the board

Each kind of object on the board has its own menu. A scene box offers Rename, Delete, Add Card, Empty Cards (move every card into the Work Area), and Delete Cards. A Work Area box offers Add Card, Empty Cards, Delete Cards, Rename Box, and Delete Box. Right-clicking empty Work Area space offers Add Card, Add Box, and Add Stack. When you merge siblings, the first in story order survives and absorbs the rest; when you split an act or chapter Quilva asks how many pieces to make and divides its children evenly between them.

Card Stacks — Instant Creative Fuel

A Stack is a group of cards created in bulk: each line you type becomes its own card. Press Ctrl+G (or the stack icon), and the new stack lands in a box in the Work Area. Every card in a stack can share tags, colour, and icon, and can optionally carry a prefix, a suffix, or be chronologically numbered. On Pro, Stacks can be built from professionally designed Card Stack templates — ready-made mini-outlines for common plot patterns, character arcs, and genre beats.

Practical Workflows

• For plotters: use the Planner early. Lay out the major beats, colour-code by act or emotional tone, and build the roadmap before drafting.
• For discovery writers: start loose. Throw ideas into Work Area boxes, write scenes as inspiration strikes, then gradually pull finished beats onto the board.
• For hybrids (most writers): move back and forth — rough structure in the Outliner, creative play in the Planner, prose in the Writer, then more rearranging.

Terminology note: "Index cards" are not the same as "scene cards." Index cards (in the Writer) can represent entire scenes and be rearranged. Scene cards (Planner) come under scenes, like beats or plot-points within a scene.

Bubbles: Your Story as a Living Mind Map

Bubbles is a mind map: every part of your project is a labelled circular bubble, and the bubbles connect into a branching tree. Colour is meaningful. The structural levels are greens that deepen as you climb the hierarchy — the Book is the deepest green, with acts and chapters in lighter sage. Scenes are a distinct warm brown by default, but a scene's fill is overridden by its status: blue for Idea, orange for Draft, an emerald-teal for Revision, and the default brown for Final. A Paratext branch is tinted violet so it never blends into the body, and cards take the theme colour you gave them in the Planner. Cards cluster at the lowest level as direct children of scenes.

Building Structure with Tab

Select a bubble and press Tab to create a child, which then becomes selected — keep pressing Tab to build downward at speed:

• Select the root and Tab makes a part.
• Select a chapter and Tab makes a scene (now selected, so Tab again makes a card under it).
• Select a scene or a card and Tab makes a card.

Type the card's text, press Enter to finish, Tab again for the next. Cards created this way get a random theme colour automatically — you are not asked to pick a theme or icon, which makes this the single fastest way to add cards anywhere in Quilva.

Branching & Isolating

Select a bubble and use Branch Visibility (Ctrl+H) to collapse its children, hiding an entire act, subplot, or character thread so you can focus; press again to expand.

Fluid Restructuring with Alt-Click

Select one or more bubbles — cards, scenes, even whole chapters or parts — then Alt-click the bubble you want them to belong to. Everything moves at once, children included, and the Outliner, Planner, and Timeline update in real time. The gesture is identical at every level: select cards and Alt-click a scene; select scenes and Alt-click a chapter; re-parent chapters into parts, and parts into different books.

Re-parenting is level-strict — a target only accepts children of the correct level, so you cannot accidentally drop a chapter onto another chapter — and it refuses moves that would create a loop. A standard Alt-click animates the moved bubbles to fresh positions around their new parent; an Alt-right-click re-parents them but keeps them where they sit on the canvas, simply rewiring the connecting lines, which is handy when you have already arranged everything by hand.

Merging, Splitting & Reordering

Right-click any bubble for a menu of structural operations — several of which live only here:

• Merge — select two or more bubbles of the same level (acts, chapters, scenes, or cards) and choose Merge. They fold into the first one in story order, which absorbs the others' children. Ideal for collapsing two thin chapters into one.
• Split… — on a single act or chapter that holds two or more children, Split divides those children across several new acts or chapters — the inverse of Merge, for when one chapter has quietly grown into three.
• Set Order — once you have dragged a parent's children around the canvas, Set Order rewrites their document order to match where you placed them: structural children are read clockwise around the parent, cards top-to-bottom. It turns a spatial arrangement into real story order.
• Everyday actions — Add a child, Rename (or Edit Card), Delete, and Show / Hide children (the same collapse as Branch Visibility / Ctrl+H). Right-clicking empty canvas offers to add a new top-level book.

As with every change in Bubbles, merges, splits, and reorders are fully undoable and ripple through the Outliner, Planner, and Timeline at once.

Canvas Control

Scroll to zoom, hold the middle mouse button to pan, double-click any bubble to rename it inline.

Keys, gestures & the rest of the toolbar

With a bubble selected: Tab adds a child, F2 renames (as does a double-click), Delete removes it, Space recentres on it, and Ctrl+H toggles its branch. Beyond the canvas tools already described, the toolbar can Hide / Show all bubbles of a given level at once — all Cards, all Scenes, all Chapters, or all Acts — to strip the map down to the layer you care about; Add Parent creates a new top-level book; Auto Arrange All uses a mass-weighted radial layout so denser branches claim more room; and Arrange Cards packs a scene's cards into a tidy grid (five per column) in Planner order. Set Order needs at least two visible children to work with.

The Timeline: Time, Threads & Pacing

A horizontal, video-editor-style workspace. Think of each card as a clip. Scenes run left to right; vertical lines mark them, solid at the start of each chapter and dotted for scenes within a chapter. The screen splits into two panels that scroll together: a left panel naming each strip with a collapse button, and a right panel with the actual timeline.

Strips & the Tag System

Strips are horizontal tracks, each governed by smart tag-based rules:

When you drag a card onto a different strip, Quilva automatically updates the card's tags to match that strip's rules, so it stays visible exactly where it belongs. To add a card directly on a strip, right-click an empty area and choose Add Card — it is automatically tagged to match. Right-click a strip's label to Edit Strip (its name, theme colour, and tag rules), reorder it with Move Up / Move Down, or Delete it.

How a drag actually retags a card

Dragging a card onto a strip does the least work needed to make it belong there: it removes any tag the strip excludes, adds any tag the strip requires, and — only if none is already present — adds the first of the strip's "any of" tags. Every other tag the card carries is left untouched, so the card keeps its identity and simply gains a home on the new strip. Adding a card directly to an empty part of a track pre-fills it with the strip's required and first optional tags and lands it on the exact scene and lane you clicked.

Lanes, the card menu, and the Work Area

When several cards share a scene on the same strip they stack into lanes rather than overlapping, so nothing is ever hidden behind another card. Right-click a card itself for Edit Card and Delete (one, or the whole selection). And if you drag a card off the timeline and onto the Ctrl+W sidebar's Work Area, it leaves its scene entirely and lands in a Work Area box — the Timeline's equivalent of the Planner's "rescue a beat" move.

Multiple Timelines — Different Lenses

The top-left dropdown lets you create, name, edit, and switch between as many timelines as you like, all operating on the exact same underlying cards and structure. Common setups: a Primary Timeline for overall flow; dedicated Character Arc timelines; a Relationship timeline; separate Subplot timelines; a Thematic timeline. You can also create a timeline called "Revision Experiment" and test radical chronological changes safely.

Workflows That Transform a Story

• Spot imbalances instantly — see if the B-story has gone quiet for six chapters or if revelations cluster.
• Weave threads deliberately — drag cards between strips to experiment with convergence points.
• Run a pacing laboratory — shift blocks of cards and feel when a section is too heavy or too thin.
• Build a Key Beats strip — one strip showing only your major turning points.

The right sidebar (Ctrl+W) is the same full card editor as in the Planner. Click any scene in the Outliner and the Timeline scrolls and zooms to it. Zoom with the toolbar buttons, with Ctrl + scroll wheel, or by pinching on a trackpad; Shift + scroll wheel scrolls horizontally; click and drag any empty area to pan; hover a scene number for its full name.

The Atlas: Your Story's Living Database

The Atlas is a categorised, profile-driven database for every character, place, organisation, theme, and idea, plus a real-time analytical view of how each one threads through the entire manuscript.

Categories & Presets

Adding a category opens the Add Category dialog with a long list of templates: characters, locations, organisations, relationships, items, creatures, flora, vehicles, events, timelines, cultures, languages, religions, politics, economics, magic systems, technologies, rules, secrets and mysteries, plots, themes, and ideas. Each preset pre-fills sensible, story-focused fields (a character template might start with name, alias, birthdate, age, gender, personality type, desire, the lie the character believes, and internal monologue). Field types available:

If no template fits, choose Custom (which asks for both singular and plural forms of its name, then a shape and a hand-built field list).

The preset list itself is editable — it is loaded from a category_presets.json file — and every preset is just a starting point: in the Add Category dialog you can rename, retype, add, or remove its fields, and change its shape, before you create it. So the templates save you typing without ever boxing you in.

Shapes, Items & Profiles

Each category is assigned one of ten shapes (square, circle, diamond, five-sided polygon, seven-sided polygon, flower, five-pointed star, heart, six-pointed star, or cloud). The shape acts as a cookie-cutter mask: every item's icon image is cropped to it, giving each category an instantly recognisable visual identity. Every item is identified by its tag — categories have no tags, items always do. To reframe an icon inside its shape, right-click the profile image to enter adjust mode, then drag to pan and scroll to zoom until it sits exactly right.

The Real Magic: Tags, Mentions & Live Analysis

Any tag created anywhere in Quilva is picked up here. Type a brand-new tag on a card and the Atlas notices it is unfamiliar and files it under Uncategorised Tags. Right-click one or more of those stray tags and Convert To turns them into fully typed, profiled items. Three panels can be toggled for any item:

• Cards — every card in the story tagged with this item's tag.
• Mentions — every place the tag appears in the actual manuscript text, with around twenty words of context on either side. Mentions also includes anything in the Other Names list.
• Sources — every image, note, table, or file in the Sources tab carrying this item's tag.

Filter by Outliner Selection narrows the Cards, Mentions, and Sources panels to whatever is selected in the Outliner, turning the Atlas from a reference into an analytical instrument. Once an item has an icon, that icon appears wherever its tag is shown; clicking any icon or tag anywhere in Quilva jumps straight to that item's profile.

Adding items, nicknames & safe deletion

Right-click a category and choose its add option (Add Character on a Characters category); as you type a name a matching tag is suggested automatically, though you can override it. Every item also has an Other Names field for nicknames, aliases, titles, and the like — exactly what powers the wider Mentions search above. Deleting an item is non-destructive in an important way: because cards and Timeline strips may reference its tag, a deleted item is moved to Uncategorised Tags rather than erased, so nothing that points at it ever breaks.

The Atlas toolbar

A row of toggles controls what each profile shows: Add Category, Show Custom Fields (on by default), Show Cards, Show Mentions, Show Sources, and Filter by Outliner selection. Turn the panels you are not using off to keep a profile focused.

Sources: Your Story's Private Vault

Sources embeds everything directly inside the .qlv project file — images, notes, tables, and documents — and ties each one to the exact part of the story it serves. Move the project and the research moves with it. No broken links, no "that perfect image was on my old laptop."

The Interface

Down the left is a list of folders; the centre shows the current view as thumbnails; the right is a preview panel that adapts to what you select (note editor, table editor, image previewer, or in-place PDF viewer). A type filter at the top narrows the view to a single kind of item — All Items, Notes, Tables, Images, PDFs, or Styled Boxes. Folders are a single level deep — no nesting. Right-click to add a folder, and reorder folders with Move Up / Move Down. The one automatic folder: when you add a profile image to an Atlas item, Quilva creates a folder named after that category.

Adding files

Add File imports from disk and converts as it goes: image files (PNG, JPG/JPEG, BMP, GIF) become image sources; a CSV becomes an editable table; and DOCX, RTF, or TXT documents come in as notes. Alongside it sit Add Note, Add Table, and Add Styled Box for building sources from scratch. The toolbar also carries Filter by Folder (on by default — switch it off to see everything at once), Filter by Outliner, the Link paperclip, and a Filter by Tag control.

Styled Boxes

A Styled Box is a small, three-part callout — an upper line, a main message, and a lower line, each of which you can switch on or off — that you build in Sources and reuse in your book. Assign it one of your saved Styles (or leave it on the default) from its right-click menu, and it carries that look wherever it goes. Like every other source it can be linked and tagged, and it can be pasted into the Designer as a ready-styled element. It pairs naturally with the Styled Box element in the Styles Editor.

Linking & Tagging

Every item can be linked to any part of your Outliner using the paperclip (Link to Outliner). Links are many-to-many: one castle photo can attach to every scene set there. Every item can also carry tags — a source tagged with an Atlas item's tag automatically appears in that item's profile under Sources. Linked/tagged items surface in the Atlas, the Bubbles sidebar, the Writer's Compass, and can be pasted into the Designer (notes pasted this way become dynamic text objects that stay connected). Right-click any item to Copy it (ready to Paste from Sources onto the Designer canvas), Move it to another folder, or delete it.

The same right-click menu carries Set Insert Style, which pre-assigns the Style a source will wear when you drop it into the Writer (separately for images, notes, tables, and styled boxes), so an inserted source arrives already looking the way you want it. Copy is offered for images and notes — the two kinds the Designer can paste onto its canvas — and a note pasted there becomes a live Dynamic Text object that stays connected to the source.

Klipper — capture without breaking flow

Klipper (Ctrl+K) is a keyboard-first quick-capture tool that creates a new Sources item from anywhere in the application — no need to switch to the Sources tab. It files the item into a Sources folder of your choosing and automatically links it to your current Outliner selection. If you trigger it while writing in Book mode, it also drops the new source in at your cursor. It is built for the moment mid-sentence when you want to stash a reference and keep going.

The Klipper dialog lets you pick the Type (Note — the default — Table, Styled Box, or Image), the Folder to file into (an existing one or a new one you name on the spot), and the insert Style, all in one place. On accept it always files the source and paperclip-links it to your current Outliner selection; in Book mode it additionally drops the source at your cursor, while in Screenplay mode (or any non-Writer tab) it files and links only. A Styled Box captured this way keeps the same three independently toggled parts — Upper Text, Message Box, Lower Text.

The Writer & Compass: Where Planning Meets the Page

This is the heart of Quilva. The Writer is designed with deep respect for the writer's fragile creative state, and its greatest strength is that it never asks you to leave your planning behind — that is the job of the Compass.

The Writer: A Calm, Purposeful Space

Two modes. Book/Prose mode is a clean, distraction-free rich-text editor with font and size control, a formatting toolbar, an optional fixed-width layout, customisable tab stops, and spellcheck. Screenplay mode is rigid by design and correct by default: Tab cycles through elements (Scene Heading, Action, Character, Dialogue, Parenthetical, Transition), Enter advances intelligently, headings and character names auto-capitalise, and parentheticals drop in with Shift+Enter. You can keep a prose and a screenplay version of the same story in one project sharing one outline.

Zooming, splitting & the All Tools toolbar

Zoom the page with Ctrl+= and Ctrl+-, reset with Ctrl+0, or hold Ctrl and use the wheel — it is a preview zoom (0.5× to 2×) that never changes your real font size or page width. Right-click in a scene and choose Split Scene Here to break it in two at the cursor. The Book editor's toolbar stays minimal for pure prose until you enable All Tools (in Settings, or for the session via Writing → Show All Tools), which adds Heading 1, Heading 2, bulleted and numbered lists, tables, and image insertion.

How the screenplay keys behave

Tab cycles the current line through Scene Heading → Action → Character → Dialogue and back to Action. Enter is context-smart: after a Character it gives you Dialogue, after a finished line of Dialogue it sets up the next Character cue, and an all-caps Action line ending in a colon becomes a Transition. Shift+Enter is the alternate path — a parenthetical inside dialogue, or another line under the same speaker. Scene headings and character names auto-capitalise, and as you type either one Quilva autocompletes from the characters and locations you have already used.

Inserting sources into your prose

While writing in Book mode you can pull a source straight in from the current scene's Compass: Insert Image, Insert Note, or Insert Table, as well as Insert Frame and Insert Page. Each appears as a small marker image while you write and resolves into fully styled content at publish — images sized to a percentage of the text width, tables with a caption and header row, lists in columns. Every insert carries its own Style (changeable per insert), and behind the scenes each is just a plain-text token ([insert:image|source|style], [frame:name], [page:name]) so your file stays portable.

Display: Writing in Context

By default the Writer shows a single scene at a time. The Display submenu (Writing → Display) lets you widen that view to a whole Chapter, Act, or Book at once — every scene in that container is rendered as a stacked column of individual editors you can scroll and write through continuously, while each block stays its own scene underneath. It works in both Book and Screenplay mode, and the menu labels follow whatever you have renamed your levels to. A Separator Lines toggle in the same submenu draws or hides the rules between scenes. Your chosen Display scope is saved with the project.

Because each scene in a Display view is its own editor rather than one long document, whichever block you click into becomes the current scene — so the Compass, the version dropdown, and the status indicator all follow your focus as you scroll. The one trade-off is that you cannot backspace or drag-select across a scene boundary; scenes stay cleanly separate underneath.

Comments & Annotations

Select any text in the Book or Screenplay editor, right-click, and choose Add Comment… to attach a private margin note — a question to yourself, a research reminder, a "fix this later." Each comment carries its own text, a colour theme, and optional tags. Right-click an existing comment to Edit or Delete it. Comments are stored separately from the manuscript text, so they never appear in any export, PDF, or published book — and because they are tracked per version and per mode (book / screenplay), a comment on one draft never bleeds into another. Toggle all comment highlights on or off at once with Writing → Show Comments; turning them off hides the tints without deleting a single note.

Versions & Status

Every scene can hold up to four versions — write completely different drafts and switch between them instantly from the version dropdown. Each version carries its own status (Idea, Draft, Revision, Final) with the consistent colour coding. Content, status, and word counts are all stored per version, so a bold experiment never overwrites the draft you trust.

The Compass — Your Intelligent Writing Companion

Toggle with Ctrl+W. It appears on the right whenever a scene-level item is selected, in both book and screenplay mode, and is scene-aware: as you move between scenes it refreshes to show what matters for the scene you are now writing. Click the Compass heading to open its editor. Every panel is optional and reorderable:

The Compass is configured through Writing → Compass Editor… (or by clicking the Compass heading): toggle each panel on or off and drag them into the order you prefer. The layout is saved with the project.

Writing Goals

Open Writing → Writing Goals… to set a target for the project — a word or page goal — along with a schedule, so Quilva can work out how much you need to write and how you are pacing toward the finish. Progress rolls over each day against a fresh baseline, and Quilva can quietly nudge you with a notification as you write. The Writing Progress panel in the Compass surfaces the same figures right beside the page, so the goal stays visible without becoming a distraction.

Retreat Mode — Pure Stillness

Press Ctrl+R and everything else fades. Tabs disappear. The Outliner vanishes. The screen becomes just you, the page, and — if you choose — the Compass, still toggleable with Ctrl+W from inside Retreat mode. The daily combination many writers swear by is Retreat plus Compass.

Importing Content

Quilva works best when you write within the application, but it imports comfortably from Word (.docx), Fountain (.fountain), Final Draft (.fdx), and Scrivener (.scriv) projects — each from File → Import. Final Draft and Scrivener also export back out, and the Final Draft bridge round-trips screenplays cleanly in our testing. Imported text counts toward your Authorship Certificate as pasted/imported, since Quilva cannot vouch for where it was originally typed. For the full detail on each importer, the Final Draft and Scrivener round-trips, and the cleanest way to bring a finished manuscript in, see Importing, Final Draft & Scrivener Compatibility below.

The Designer & Publisher: From Manuscript to Book

The Designer (Pro) is a vector-based page-layout studio built directly into your project — think of it as a focused version of a tool like Illustrator or CorelDRAW, tightly bound to your book's structure. Your written content is the dynamic layer; the Designer controls the presentation layer. Edit a paragraph in the Writer and it updates in the designed pages. Reorder chapters and the book reflows. Structural change is non-destructive to the design.

The Toolbar (left of canvas)

Select, Draw, Shapes, Polygon, Node Editor, Text, List, Dynamic Text, Image, Eyedropper (Ctrl+click changes outline colour), Zoom, Snap (to a grid set in the Layout tab), and Link (links items to Outliner sections, toggling their visibility). All tools are context-aware: selecting an item updates the right-hand Color, Fonts, and Properties panels. The clipart library (hundreds of original vector pieces) and the ~200-font curated library both live in right-side tabs.

The Shapes button opens a dropdown grouped into Basic (rectangle, square, ellipse, circle), Polygons (pentagon through decagon, plus a Custom Polygon… entry for any number of sides), and Special (heart, arrow, cross, lightning bolt, and a Custom Star… builder). A Lock button at the bottom of the toolbar locks the selected objects so they cannot be moved, transformed, deleted, or edited; click it again (or use the right-click menu) to unlock.

Working with Objects

Everything you draw is an object you can rearrange, copy, align, and protect. The object toolbar and the canvas right-click menu share the same commands:

• Clipboard — Copy (Ctrl+C), Cut (Ctrl+X), Paste (Ctrl+V), Paste in Place (Ctrl+Shift+V, drops the copy at the exact same coordinates), and Duplicate (Shift+D).
• Arrange (z-order) — To Front, Forward, Backward, and To Back move an object up and down the stack of overlapping items.
• Align — Align Left, Right, Top, Bottom, Center Horizontal, and Center Vertical line selected objects up against each other.
• Lock / Unlock — freeze objects in place so a stray click can't disturb finished work.
• Glue & Slice — with two or more polygons selected, Glue (Ctrl+U) fuses them into a single shape and Slice divides one apart — the building blocks for custom vector artwork.
• Paste from Sources — drop an image or note straight from the Sources tab onto the canvas; pasted notes arrive as dynamic text objects that stay linked.

Layers

Each design (each item in the Content List) has its own set of layers, managed in the Layers panel on the right beneath the Content list. Add a new layer, rename it by double-clicking, and select a layer to make it the active one for new objects. To move existing objects onto a specific layer, select them, right-click, and choose Set Layer.

Layouts, Content & Pages

The Designer uses two linked systems. A Layout defines the rules of a page — paper size, margins, content type (Book or Screenplay), fonts, indents, and verso/recto eligibility. The Content List (in the Design tab, visible when nothing on the canvas is selected) is the list of your actual design work, each item linked to a Layout. Reuse one Layout for the whole book, or give every content item its own. Think of a page not as a single page used once but as a template used over and over. Every page has a Page Type:

A newly created page starts as Referenced until you give it another type. Paratext pages behave like Main Content for layout and preview purposes; every other type (Referenced, Blank, Only Frames, and the rest) is laid out only at its designated point.

Frames — Smart Insertions

Frames let you place design elements (borders, ornaments, illustrations, dynamic text) at precise points during publishing. Created within Layouts, drawn on the canvas, then filled in the Design tab, frames carry insert checkboxes: Chapter Start/End, Scene Start/Body/End, Act Start/End, Book Start/End. You can also drop a frame at an exact spot by typing [frame:name] in the Writer. Frame settings include Name, Width of Content (a percentage of the text-line width), Alignment (Left/Center/Right), and an Order Number (usually ignorable).

If two layouts contain frames with the same name, you can disambiguate by qualifying the token with the content item: [frame:ContentItem/FrameName] (and likewise [page:ContentItem/PageName] for pages). The bare [frame:name] and [page:Name] forms keep working when names are unique.

The Publisher — Content Modes

The Publisher's Content dropdown offers four ways to turn a project into a finished file. (The first, Quick Publish, is the simple PDF/Word path older guides refer to as "eBook" mode.)

• Quick Publish — the fast, everyday PDF, and the place you export to Word (.docx). Despite the name it is far from bare: you get a cover page (from an image file or a Designer page), a customisable text title page, an optional Table of Contents, page numbering, full body and heading typography (font, size, alignment, colour), and paragraph indentation control (auto-tab plus tab width). On Pro you can also append the Authorship Certificate as a final page (see below).
• Styled Book — the same clean pipeline as Quick Publish, but the typography for every element (headings, body, lists, tables) is driven by a single saved Style you pick from a dropdown rather than set control by control. It adds a fully configurable Table of Contents and alternate (mirrored) margins for binding, and exports both PDF and Word.
• Designed Book — the powerful path where your Designer layouts become a press-ready PDF (the five-step pipeline below). Page size and margins come from the Master, and its publish form adds finishing controls: per-element styling (separate styles for body, headings, lists, tables, and images), forcing chapters to start on a left or right page, predictable pagination, and drop caps (with a choice of designs and adjustable size).
• Screenplay — quick screenplay PDFs, restricted to the two industry-standard paper sizes (A4 and US Letter), and the place you export to Fountain.

When you publish a Designed Book, Quilva runs a precise five-step pipeline:

1. Compile Directory — prepares the temporary publish folder set in Settings (must be writable).
2. Understanding your Vision — reads your choices from the settings form and analyses the Designer (Master page, layouts, frames, page types, Content List order).
3. Text Render — renders the Writer's text to disk as separate PDFs to count pages accurately (no images or page numbers yet).
4. Book Plan — builds the exact order of every page, including frame and blank insertion, verso/recto, and page numbering.
5. Assembly — combines everything into one final multi-page PDF.

The Styles Editor

A Style is a saved, reusable set of typography and formatting rules — the look of a book captured in one file. Open the editor from the Publisher's Styles button (the Publisher tab toggles between Preview and Styles) or from the Edit menu. The left column lists your styles with buttons to create, duplicate, rename, and delete them — a built-in default style is protected and always present — and the right side is a live preview that re-renders as you make changes.

Within a single Style you control the appearance of every structural element independently:

• Page — margins and overall page setup.
• Heading 1, Heading 2, and Paragraph — font, size, colour, alignment, bold/italic/underline, spacing (padding and margins), borders, and background.
• Ordered & Unordered Lists — including the bullet or numbering style.
• Tables and Images — borders, spacing, alignment, and backgrounds.
• Styled Box — the boxed callout used for inserts, with its own borders, background, and even a background-image option.

Styles power the Styled Book publish mode and the per-element styling in Designed Book mode, so once you craft a look you can reuse it across projects. You can also export a single style — or all of your styles at once — as a .qlva Quilva Asset Pack, to back them up or carry them to another machine.

Dynamic Text Reference

Dynamic Text lets layout elements update automatically by context. A title such as "Chapter One" seamlessly becomes "Chapter Two" without manual edits, making reusable page templates that adapt as content evolves.

Example. Putting this as Dynamic Content:

<b>Chapter [ChapterNumber]: </b><br /><i>[Chapter]</i>

renders as Chapter Two / My Custom Chapter Title in one place and Chapter Four / Another Chapter in another — from a single template.

Supported HTML Formatting

• Bold: <b>Bold Text</b>
• Italic: <i>Italic Text</i>
• Underline: <u>Underline Text</u>
• Line Break: <br />

Dynamic Text Code Reference

Testing: navigate to different places in the Outliner and watch the canvas update. If it doesn't update, force a refresh with the Refresh Content button in the right sidebar. Page numbers in Design View are approximate previews only; final, accurate numbering is calculated when you publish.

The Human Authorship Certificate

A Pro feature. While you write, Quilva keeps a small, private notebook of how you write — not the words, the patterns. To create one: Help → Create Certificate, follow the prompts, then save & share the generated QR image.

What Quilva quietly notices

1. Keystrokes. Every key press counts as one. A real novel is hundreds of thousands of them, with no shortcut.
2. Pasted text. One paste, two keystrokes, five thousand words — an unmistakable ratio.
3. Imported documents. Treated as paste, since their origin cannot be vouched for.
4. Deletions. A quietly positive signal — real writers cut and rewrite.
5. Time spent actually working. The clock pauses when you walk away; an app left running overnight earns nothing.

Versions & the work that counts

The certificate looks only at the active version of each scene — the one you chose to publish — and ignores anything with the Publish box unticked, so earlier AI-assisted drafts neither help nor hurt.

Why you can't cheat by editing the file

The seal is encrypted and bound to the specific file. Edit the project in a text editor, copy the seal between projects, or delete the record entirely, and the certificate feature locks permanently for that file (you can still finish and publish the book — you simply cannot produce a certificate from a tampered file). Because the certificate displays a few sentences chosen at random from the manuscript, you cannot use one human-written book's certificate to vouch for a different one.

Quilva is honest about the limits: no system can perfectly distinguish a novel written from imagination from one painstakingly retyped while faking human rhythm, and a determined expert could eventually break any system that runs on a normal computer. What the certificate proves is concrete: that the book came together through real keystrokes, real time, and real editing inside Quilva — a proof of effort.

What the seal actually contains

For the technically curious: the sealed QR does not store your manuscript or raw keystrokes. It carries seven numbers — words pasted and words deleted in the book editor, words pasted and words deleted in the screenplay editor, your total working minutes, your total book words, and your total script lines — rolled up only from each scene's active, published version (status is irrelevant; an unpublished scene contributes nothing, and imported text is already counted as pasted). Those numbers, plus a few randomly chosen manuscript sentences, are compressed, encrypted with a key derived through PBKDF2 and an AES-256 stream cipher, and packed into a fixed-size QR code that scans on quilva.com to display the readout. The encryption and the random sentences are what make a certificate impossible to forge, reuse on another book, or recover from a hand-edited file.

A Tool for Education

The same mechanism records how a piece of work came into existence — the thousands of keystrokes, pauses, and revisions a genuine essay accumulates, against the flat signature of a last-minute paste. It supports academic integrity without intrusive monitoring, protects honest students who can prove their effort, and works entirely offline. Institutional licences and bulk pricing are available; contact the team.

Importing, Final Draft & Scrivener Compatibility

Quilva is built to be the place you plan, write, and publish — but it is a good citizen about moving work in and out. You can bring in a manuscript from Word or a screenplay from Fountain, and Quilva reads and writes both Final Draft (.fdx) and Scrivener in both directions — the Final Draft bridge round-trips a screenplay cleanly, structure and all (with the usual caveats of any cross-program bridge). Everything here lives under the File → Import and File → Export menus.

Word Document Import (.docx)

File → Import → Word Document. Pick a .docx and Quilva builds a fresh book in Book mode, even suggesting a title from the prominent text near the top of the document. The only real question is how Quilva should find your structure — where one act, chapter, or scene ends and the next begins — and you have two ways to answer it.

• Smart formatting detection (recommended, on by default). Quilva studies the document’s own formatting: it works out the dominant body-text style, then treats the paragraphs that break from it — a different font, size or weight; short isolated lines; all-caps headings — as structural markers. It groups those into families and decides which family is an Act/Part and which is a Chapter, using the amount of prose between headings as a tie-breaker. No special markup required; it simply reads the shape of the document.
• Manual structure detection (smart mode off). Take direct control with two independent settings, one for Act/Part and one for Chapter. Each can divide by Heading Level (Word’s built-in Heading 1–9 styles) or by a Text Marker — a literal token you place on its own line (the defaults are ### for parts and # for chapters). Act/Part can also be set to None (single act) when your book has no parts.

Scene breaking. Once the chapters are found, Quilva divides each chapter’s prose into scenes by length, guided by a minimum and maximum word count (defaults 800 and 2,000). You arrive with sensibly sized scenes you can immediately reorder on the corkboard, rather than one undifferentiated wall of text.

Fountain Script Import (.fountain)

File → Import → Fountain Script. Quilva parses standard Fountain — scene headings (INT., EXT. and their variants), action, character cues, dialogue, parentheticals, and transitions such as FADE IN: or CUT TO: — quietly skips the title-page block at the top of the file, and drops you into Script mode when it is done. Because a screenplay is essentially one long flat stream, Quilva folds it into the Book → Act → Chapter → Scene hierarchy for you:

• You choose the number of acts (1–5). Quilva estimates page lengths (roughly 54 lines to a page) to suggest where each act falls, and — importantly — snaps every act boundary to the nearest scene heading so a scene is never cut in half. The suggested ranges are yours to adjust before importing.
• Screenplay scenes are grouped into sequences that become Quilva chapters; set scenes per sequence to control how many screenplay scenes sit in each chapter.
• Very short scenes are merged with their neighbours so you do not end up with a litter of one-line slivers.

Final Draft Compatibility (.fdx)

Quilva reads and writes Final Draft (.fdx) screenplays, and this is one of its strongest format bridges — built to travel in both directions, so a script can leave Quilva for Final Draft and come back with its structure, scene names, summaries and comments intact. It works as well as it does because Quilva reads and writes Final Draft’s own structural model rather than guessing at it, which leaves little to interpret and little to lose. In testing so far it has round-tripped reliably.

Importing from Final Draft — File → Import → Final Draft Script. This opens an import wizard much like the Fountain one. Quilva reads the screenplay body — scene headings, action, character cues, dialogue, parentheticals and transitions, which map one-for-one onto Quilva’s own screenplay elements — and drops you into Script mode. Dual-dialogue blocks are flattened into ordinary stacked character/dialogue (Quilva has no two-column concept), and cues are normalised to upper case, so what arrives reads as a clean Quilva script.

Names and summaries come across with it: scene names from each scene’s title (falling back to the slugline when Final Draft left it blank), scene synopses from the Story Map’s scene summaries, and act and sequence names and descriptions from the strips themselves. Comments come across faithfully too. Each Final Draft ScriptNote becomes a Quilva comment anchored to the run of text it highlighted — the actual words, not just an approximate spot — and the note’s colour is matched to the nearest Quilva comment theme. As with every importer, the words count toward the Authorship Certificate as imported.

The wizard lets you set the project title, choose which editor to open in (Script by default), switch on screenplay terminology (Screenplay → Act → Sequence → Scene), and decide whether to bring comments in. If a Final Draft file has no Story Map — a flat script with no outline at all — Quilva falls back gracefully, treating each scene heading as a scene and grouping them into sequences, with a scenes per sequence control exactly like the Fountain importer.

Exporting to Final Draft — File → Export → Final Draft (.fdx). This is the same confident, Quilva-controls-the-structure direction as the Scrivener export, and it is a big part of why the round-trip holds up so well. Your Book → Act → Sequence → Scene becomes a proper Final Draft script: each scene’s current screenplay version is written into the body, every scene heading carries its page, its synopsis and its Quilva scene name (which is what lets names survive the trip out and back), and your structure is written onto the Story Map as clean, non-overlapping act and sequence strips. Because Quilva is deciding the layout, the strips tile exactly along the scene boundaries — laid out by page count and snapped to where Final Draft will paginate the script — and the beat board is arranged on a tidy grid, with acts across the top and their sequences beneath. Comments are written back as Final Draft ScriptNotes, anchored by the same highlighted-phrase rule and coloured from your Quilva themes; a title page and character autocomplete (SmartType) are filled in for good measure.

Scrivener Compatibility (.scriv)

Quilva reads and writes Scrivener 3 projects, so the two programs can sit side by side in a workflow. The two directions are not equally smooth, though, and it is worth being plain about why — not to make excuses, but so you know what to expect and can choose the right path.

Exporting to Scrivener — confident, close to flawless. File → Export → Scrivener Project. This direction is the strong one, for a simple reason: Quilva is the program deciding the structure and the formatting, so it writes a clean, predictable project rather than trying to interpret someone else’s. Your Book → Act → Chapter → Scene hierarchy becomes Scrivener’s binder of folders and text documents; your summaries become Scrivener synopses; your Sources arrive as items in the research folder; and the links you made between scenes and sources are rebuilt as Scrivener bookmarks in both directions. Index cards can even round-trip without loss. This makes one workflow genuinely excellent and worth highlighting:

Importing from Scrivener — good, but plan to tidy up. File → Import → Scrivener Project opens a dedicated import wizard. It shows two panes: on the left, your Scrivener Binder exactly as it stands; on the right, a live Quilva Outliner preview. Quilva reads the shape of your binder and proposes a role for every item — Book, Act, Chapter, Scene, Card, Source, or Ignore — and you refine it: select any item or a whole subtree and change its role, Promote or Demote it a level, Auto-map a branch, or Reset to Quilva’s proposal. The preview updates as you go, so you can see precisely how the binder will land before you commit. Research files come across into the Sources tab, and any links Scrivener recorded between a document and its research are rebuilt as Quilva source links.

Why the import is not perfect — and why a perfect one is close to impossible. Scrivener keeps each document’s text as RTF, and RTF is a deliberately loose format: there are many equally valid ways to encode the same paragraph, list, or table, and those conventions have accumulated across many years and versions of the program. On top of that, the different ways a project can leave Scrivener — its internal RTF, an “export to web” HTML file, a “compile to Word” document — do not all describe the same content in the same way; lists, headings, tables and footnotes can each emerge differently depending on the route taken and the project’s own editing history. Quilva reads the internal RTF directly and handles it carefully, but reconstructing one writer’s exact intent from that much variety — every list style, every heading convention, every embedded note — is a problem with no perfect solution for any tool. So the importer gets you faithfully most of the way there and leaves you a little cleanup, rather than pretending the result is flawless.

In practice, after a .scriv import, plan to glance over a few things: heading levels (Quilva infers them from text size and may not match every named style), the occasional list or table, and a handful of items Quilva intentionally leaves out on the way in — footnotes and comments, images pasted inside scene text (images that are their own binder items do come across, into Sources), and screenplay formatting (script content currently arrives as prose rather than in the script editor). None of this disturbs your existing work: an import only adds a new book to your project and can be undone.

The cleanest way in: route through Word. Because the most reliable structure is the one you define explicitly, the smoothest path from a finished Scrivener project into Quilva is often not the direct .scriv import at all. Instead, Compile your Scrivener project to a Word (.docx) file, giving each part and chapter a clear heading as you compile — Heading 1 for parts/acts, Heading 2 for chapters, or simple text markers — and then bring that file in with Quilva’s Word importer. You control the compile, so the structure arrives explicit and tidy, and Quilva’s detection has something clean to work from. For a completed manuscript, this usually lands better than asking any importer to infer structure from Scrivener’s internal files.

Exporting & Publishing

Quilva can export to PDF, Word Doc (.docx) for books, and Fountain (.fountain) for screenplays. For quick and simple publishing, go to the Publisher tab, adjust a few basic settings, and hit publish.

• Four content modes in the Publisher's Content dropdown: Quick Publish, Styled Book, Designed Book, and Screenplay.
• Quick Publish is the fast PDF path and the home of Word (.docx) export — but it still offers covers, a title page, a table of contents, page numbering, and full typography control.
• Styled Book produces the same PDF/Word output but drives all typography from a reusable Style and adds a configurable table of contents and mirrored binding margins.
• Screenplay mode is for quick screenplay exports. Fountain (.fountain) export lives in Screenplay mode, which is limited to A4 and US Letter paper.
• Quick Publish (Ctrl+P) as a shortcut activates either the Book or Screenplay path for quick publishing of the Outliner selection only — and works even when not in the Publisher tab.
• Use Designed Book mode for maximum formatting control. A working compile directory must be set in Settings for a successful Designed Book publish.

The Treatment Exporter

From the File menu, Export Treatment produces a polished PDF overview of your planning — not the prose itself, but the shape of the story. It walks the whole project and lays out the title and summary of each level (book, act, chapter, scene), and for each scene can include its cards, tags, status, notes, and linked sources (images, notes, tables, and styled boxes appear inline; linked PDFs are left out to keep the treatment compact). Its signature touch: a scene's cards are rendered as a continuous, highlighted inline flow — each card a phrase tinted in its theme colour — so a scene reads as one compact, colour-coded sentence rather than a grid of boxes.

An export dialog lets you toggle exactly what appears — which titles and summaries to include, and which scene extras (notes are off by default, as they often hold private scratch text) — and choose the font and paper size. The result is rendered through the same WeasyPrint engine as the rest of Quilva's publishing, so it looks like a proper document: ideal for a pitch, a planning review with a co-author, or simply seeing your whole structure on a few pages.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Designer Navigation

Designer Objects

Note: the User Guide consistently lists Add Card as Ctrl+D (used above); one place in the online docs lists it as Ctrl+E, which is also the Add Items binding. If a shortcut behaves unexpectedly, check the in-app menus for the binding on your version.

Troubleshooting

• Report a bug: email support@quilva.com — a real share of features began as user suggestions.
• App crashes on launch: check system requirements (8 GB RAM minimum); update graphics drivers.
• License not activating: contact support@quilva.com (include your key).
• "Already activated on the maximum number of machines": a licence activates on up to three devices. If you have changed computers or reinstalled your operating system, email support@quilva.com with your key and the team will free up a slot.
• Antivirus false positive: add an exception for the Quilva folder (the local authorship detection can trip a few scanners on first run).
• Recovering work: rename a backup file (a .QLB file) back to a .qlv extension — no proprietary recovery tool needed.
• Wrong book publishing: force the correct one by selecting it (or its children) in the Outliner before publishing.

Support & Community

Quilva is made by a small team that reads every message sent to support@quilva.com. Including your license key in support emails helps them assist faster (and often bumps you up the queue). Lost your license? Send your full name and the email address used, and they can look it up on record.

If you love the software, the most useful thing you can do is tell other writers — and if you have an idea that would make it better, send it. That is genuinely how the program has been built.