Changelog

v1.2.5

October 2026 Release

Write in seven languages

• Settings → Language: choose the language you write in (English, Español, Français, Deutsch, Português, Italiano or Русский), or let Alistair work it out from each scene's text.
• Dialogue is recognised the way each language writes it: quotation marks (“…”, «…», „…“, »…«) and dash-style dialogue as in Russian, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese prose, including the author's words between dashes (— Да, — сказала она. —) and incises inside guillemets (« Je viens, dit-il, demain. »). Plain-text "--" dashes count too.
• Importing a manuscript splits chapters on headings in every supported language: Capítulo, Chapitre, Kapitel, Capitolo, Глава, and their Prologue, Part and Epilogue equivalents.
• The spelling dictionary follows your language, with regional variants, and right-click suggestions work in every language, from the same dictionary that underlines the word: "bonjur" offers bonjour, "Hauss" offers Haus, "превет" offers привет.
• The dictionaries come with Alistair and work offline. Alistair never downloads one; before, choosing a language other than US English made the spellchecker fetch its dictionary from Google.
• French (Canada), German (Austria) and German (Switzerland) now check in French and German; they used to fall back to US English.

Who's speaking: the Dialogue panel and read-aloud

• Speakers worked out from context, the way a reader does: speech tags ("said Mara", "she said", "said I" in first-person books), the action next to a line ("She paused."), who the previous line spoke to by name, and turn-taking in a conversation. Lines where Alistair guessed are marked guessed, with the reason on hover.
• Works in all seven languages, using each language's speech verbs and pronouns: "dijo ella", "dit-il", "sagte er", "disse lui", and Russian's past tense, where "сказала" tells you a woman spoke even without a name.
• Correct a line and the lines around it follow. Clear choices forgets the speakers you picked in a scene.
• A learned scorer weighs all of those clues together for lines without a named tag, using weights learned from hand-labelled novels, and answers only when it's confident. On novels it wasn't trained on, more lines get a speaker and fewer get the wrong one (about 5% fewer wrong voices in English). In the other six languages, between a fifth and twice as many lines get a speaker, and more of them are right: Spanish from 53% to 64%, French 64% to 75%, Italian 60% to 74%.
• The Dialogue panel and read-aloud always agree on who speaks each line.
• The Rhythm panel keeps a long sentence-length heatmap to four rows, with a button to show every sentence, and the poem line count no longer drops to 0 when you click outside the poem.

Read-aloud in more languages

• Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese voices (Dora, Alex, Siwis, Sara, Nicola and more), pronounced in their own language rather than with an English accent.
• Characters without a chosen voice get one in the scene's language that matches the gender on their character sheet.
• Long passages split cleanly at sentence ends in every language.
• German (Kerstin) and Russian (Sveta, Masha, Dima) voices are optional downloads in Settings → Text to Speech, so they don't add to the installer's size. Alistair contacts the site only when you click Download, and the voices work offline afterwards.

Review

• Reviewers can reply to your comments; replies appear under the comment in your Comments panel.
• A summary before you import: each reviewer's notes counted by kind, with one switch to take or skip all of theirs, then the notes grouped by chapter with any suggested text.
• Choose chapters to send: pick a run (Chapters 3 to 5) or Shift-click, and include front or back matter.
• Review Mode and the chapter picker read properly in dark theme, and highlights land on the right words.

Screenplay

• Comments use the same Comments panel and Add Comment dialog as a manuscript, and export to Fountain as notes.
• Revisions: pick a revision colour and every line you change is starred (*) in the margin and on the page, the way production drafts mark new pages. The Compiler can print only the revised pages.
• Dual dialogue, side by side, in the editor, the PDF, Fountain and Final Draft.
• Real pages: the script shows page by page with "Page X of Y"; Ctrl+G goes to a page.
• Final Draft import alongside Fountain, and a Reports tab in the Compiler: scene breakdown in eighths, cast with lines and words, locations and writers' notes.
• Table read: the speech panel reads the script with a voice per character.
• Tab cycles a line's element type; Focus Mode focuses the line or speech you're on.
• Older versions of a script open read-only, and version compare works for scripts.
• The screenplay editor follows the app's light and dark theme and accent colour, like the manuscript editor.
• The "Page X of Y" badge sits clear of the scrollbar.

Watermarks

• Manuscript, screenplay and picture book PDFs can carry a watermark: the industry-standard diagonal CONFIDENTIAL with the recipient's name, or your own text, in a standard sans-serif or your document's font.

Picture Books

• Print-ready PDFs at the book's own trim size, with optional bleed, covers left out for printers that want them separately, and page-count checks (even pages, 32 standard, KDP's 24-page minimum).
• Artwork is kept at full resolution and prints at full resolution.
• Publishing trim sizes (8.5″ square and more) next to home paper sizes.
• Read aloud for spreads and the whole book.

World Building, Location and Character sheets

• World Building in four tabs: Land, Peoples, Powers and History, instead of one long page.
• Location sheets in tabs: Profile, History, Connections and Notes. The two sections that were both called Lore are now History & Secrets (your notes) and Lore Entries (the Lore set here).
• Sheets reopen on the tab you used last. The Character sheet's tabs no longer show a stray scroll bar.
• "+ Create new Location…" (and Species, Religion, Magic System) in a sheet's dropdowns works again in the app, with Alistair's own dialog.

Look and finding your way

• Nordic Slate: the dark theme is now a calm slate palette after the popular Nord theme, with frost-blue accents and text that's easier on the eyes at night.
• The left rail shows the buttons that fit where you are: Home is always there, project import and export only on the home screen, and a project's folders once you're in it.
• The icon picker follows the theme, finds icons by meaning ("fire" finds flame, "magic" finds sparkles), remembers the ones you used lately, and no longer shows blank tiles for some icons.
• Dark mode now reaches every screen: the Compiler, the Story Board canvases and the Story Arc timeline follow the theme, and switch with it, instead of staying light. The welcome screen's Continue card and Open button are quieter in the dark.

Templates you design (no code)

• Templates that know your story: new fields in the visual builder read your project. A Project list shows characters, places, scenes or a template's documents, filtered ("whose Role is Mentor"), sorted, as a list, cards or a table, or only the ones that link to this document. A Lookup shows a detail of what a link points to, such as the linked character's role. Mentions finds the scenes that name the document, with the passage. Count or total counts documents, totals a number, or counts words, scenes or mentions. All of them keep up as you write.
• Calculated fields work out a number from the page with a formula like [Power] × [Charges], checked as you type, and saved so lists can use it.
• Show only when: any field or section can appear only when another field has a certain value. Hidden fields keep what's in them.
• Buttons make a new document (one like this, another template's, or a character, place or note), linked back to this one if you like. Alistair asks first; see Template changes below.
• Each document's own icon: click the icon at the top of a document, or Change Icon… in the folder menu, and pick an icon and a colour, or use your own picture, previewed at every size it's shown and kept in the project. A template's icon can be a picture too, and sections can have icons.
• Image fields now keep their picture (they didn't before), cropped to the shape you choose, with a caption that screen readers read too. File fields attach a document, spreadsheet, sound or video to the project.
• A document shows its own title at the top, with the template's name above it.
• Make a code copy turns a visual template into one in HTML, CSS and JavaScript that does the same things, to take further in code.
• Try it fills in the form in the builder before you save; field names say what each one is for, and a field can change kind and keep its label. Templates assigned to a folder show in that folder's Add new.
• History: every save keeps the version it replaced, to look at and restore. Template Manager shows each template as a small picture of itself.

Templates in code

• Template API: a freeform template's JavaScript can read your project through alistair: characters, locations, factions, lore, scenes in order with who appears in each, word counts, a manuscript search, and any document's text or fields. It can also open documents, copy text, show a message, ask your local language model, and refresh itself when you save.
• Template changes, with your permission: createDocument, setField and setStatus let a template make documents and change fields and statuses. Templates can be shared, so Alistair asks first: Allow, Always allow this template, or Don't allow. Every change shows a message with Undo, and Template Manager shows which templates may change your project without asking, with Stop. In the builder's preview nothing changes. getData and setData give each template its own small store in the project.
• An API tab in the builder lists every call with an example: Insert adds working code, Try it runs the call on the open project. The full reference is in the docs under Template API.
• Seven ready-made code templates under New Template: Cast Board, Scene Tracker, Mentions Finder, Word Goal, Dialogue Balance, Editorial To-Do and Name Generator.
• A Console under the preview shows what your code logs and its errors, each linked to its line, and the line is marked in the editor. Format tidies your code, Find works in each tab, and the preview switches between light, dark and narrow widths. Ctrl+S saves, and Save shows when there are unsaved changes.
• Freeform template documents follow your light or dark theme and accent colour.
• Code highlighting like VS Code in the HTML, CSS and JS tabs: colours, line numbers, matching brackets and tags, auto-closing tags, Ctrl+/ to comment, and alistair. autocomplete.
• "LLM Generate" with Replace unticked adds to your code instead of replacing it, and generated JavaScript can use the Template API.
• Saved custom templates open in the builder for editing again, freeform ones in the code builder (they used to open in the visual one).
• Exported templates import correctly (the file was missing the template itself), and the import shows what the template reads before you add it.
• Template documents kept in a subfolder now save their fields, and opening a document while the code builder is open no longer leaves the builder covering it.

Chat

• Retry no longer sends your question to the model twice.

Verified Writing

• The Verify Report button is gone from the app. Your writing history and the signed Authorship Report stay; whoever receives a report checks it with the small standalone verifier.

v1.2.4

September 2026 Release

World Building

• Three new document types: Magic System, Religion, and Species / Race, each gets its own full document (rules, costs, practitioners, deities, physical description, culture, and so on), the same way Faction and Location already do, instead of a single textarea buried inside World Building.
• World Building's old Magic System, Religion & Beliefs, and Sentient Races fields now point at these new document types instead of holding everything as prose. Existing projects with notes already written in those fields get a one-time banner offering to create a real document from that text; nothing is deleted.
• Magic System, Religion, and Species documents can each carry their own uploaded image. Click the icon, pick a photo, drag to reposition, same as Character and Location portraits.
• Places & Powers (inside World Building) now lists Magic Systems, Religions, and Species alongside Locations, Factions, and Territories, and shows each one's uploaded photo as a thumbnail when it has one.
• A Faction document now shows which Magic Systems and Religions name it as an associated Faction, the same way it already shows the Locations it governs.
• A Character sheet now has Species, Religion, and Magic System fields. Pick an existing document, type a name freely if you don't want a full document for it yet, or create one on the spot from the dropdown without leaving the character sheet. Magic System, Religion, and Species documents show which Characters are linked to them in return.

World Map

• A territory whose name simply repeats the Faction that owns it no longer shows that name twice: once as its own label, once again in the Faction dropdown right next to it.
• A Faction that owns more than one territory now shows the extra ones as a compact pill instead of a full duplicate row each. Click a pill to expand it into the full editable row, and back again when you're done.
• Towns now have their own toolbar button and panel, split out from Territories, a cleaner separation now that Territories can hold considerably more per-row detail.

Lore and the Lore Book

• New Lore document type for historical events, eras, myths, prophecies, and cosmology. Give each one a place on your world's timeline, and link the Factions, Places, and People involved.
• World Building's History & Lore section now shows every Lore document as a timeline, in order.
• Faction, Location, and Character sheets list the Lore that mentions them.
• Lore Book: a printable guide to your world, compiled from your Lore, Factions, Places, Species, Religions, Magic Systems, and (optionally) Characters. Pick which chapters to include, add a title page and foreword, and export to PDF or HTML. It's separate from the Compiler, which still builds your manuscript.
• Notes, secrets, and "Truth vs. Belief" stay out of the Lore Book unless you turn them on, so a reader-facing guide can't give away your twists.

Better linked documents

• Renames follow everywhere. Rename a Character, Location, Faction, Species, Religion, or Magic System and every sheet, scene, map label, and Storyboard that refers to it updates too, including documents open in other windows.
• A Character's or Location's "Scene Introduced" now remembers the actual scene, so it stays correct when you rename that scene, even if another scene shares its old title.
• The Character sheet is split into tabs, and its Origin now picks from your Locations.
• Characters can list the Factions they belong to, and each Faction shows its members.
• Location sheets show which characters come from there and where the place appears in your story.
• The World Building overview shows how connected each Location, Faction, Species, Religion, and Magic System is at a glance.

Atlas

• The geographic map now has its own Atlas tab in the Storyboard, next to Characters, World, and Timeline. The World tab keeps the location and story diagrams.
• Reshape territories by painting land onto them with a brush.
• Draw roads between towns.
• A town assigned to a Location stays linked to that document, so renaming the Location renames the right town and "Show on map" finds it, even when two towns share a name.

Story Arc and Character Map

• Story Arc picks up new scenes on its own, including scenes added in another window. No more manual step to add them.
• The Character Map shows small badges for each character's linked details.
• Character Map initials stay readable on light character colours, and full names no longer cut off.

Scene editor

• Bold, Italic, Underline, and Scene break buttons on the toolbar. The formatting buttons light up when the cursor is in formatted text.
• Manuscript-style first-line indents in the editor (Settings → Writing Tools), and a matching First-line indents option in the Compiler for PDF and DOCX.
• Spell check is always on and knows your story. Every character, place, faction, species, religion, magic system, and lore name (plus aliases) is a known word, so invented names are never underlined. The old on/off setting, which only hid suggestions, is gone.
• Automatic restore points. Version History now keeps a version when you open a scene, after each pause in writing (and every few minutes in long sessions), and before restoring an older version or using Replace All. Each version shows the words added or cut.
• Auto-save now saves at a steady interval while you type. Before, steady typing could go a full five minutes without a save.
• Analyze, Multi-Scene, and a new Tools menu (Project Dictionary and Aliases) moved after the formatting controls.
• The "last saved" badge now shows the open document's own last save.
• Version History closes with Esc, and its messages use the app's own dialogs.
• Page view. Scenes are laid out as separate Letter pages with a gap between them, as the Compiler will print them: the chapter title's drop on page 1 and whole paragraphs carried to the next page (a paragraph longer than a page continues line by line). Turn it off in Settings → Writing Tools → Show Pages.
• Page 3 of 12 at the bottom right shows the page you're on. Click it, or press Ctrl+G, to go to a page.
• Crash recovery. While a scene has unsaved changes, Alistair keeps a copy on your computer. If it closes before saving (a crash or a power cut), the scene offers the changes back next time: Restore it, or Discard. Restoring can be undone.
• Scenes saved with the old font-size bug are repaired when you open them, so Select All and Delete work in them again.
• Nothing typed is lost when you move on. Opening another scene, switching project, turning on Multi-Scene, closing a tab, or closing Alistair now saves what you typed since the last auto-save. Before, those words could be lost.
• Changing the font size of text that spans several paragraphs no longer breaks Select All and Delete afterwards.
• New paragraphs use the line spacing chosen in the toolbar right away, not only after reopening the scene.
• Replace All can be undone with Ctrl+Z.
• The alignment buttons show the current paragraph's alignment.
• Autocorrect and Smart Quotes moved from the toolbar to Settings → Writing Tools, next to a new Spelling language choice (US, UK, Canadian, or Australian English). Autocorrect never splits your story's names.
• Auto-save now defaults to every minute.
• The Writing and Cast labels on the bottom bar open a list naming each highlight, with its on/off state.
• Deleting a project also removes its story names from the spelling dictionary, unless another project uses them.
• Find & Replace updates live. Matches refresh as you type, undo, or paste with the panel open, words split by formatting (a half-italic word) are found and replaced, and Replace moves on to the next match.
• Opening a scene no longer marks it as having unsaved changes.
• Ctrl+Z right after typing undoes that typing, not the change before it.

Version History

• Each version says what it changed, quoting the words you added, cut, or edited, so similar versions are easy to tell apart.
• Versions are grouped by day, newest first, with "Current text" always at the top. Click a version to open it.
• Give a version a name you'll recognize, like "Sent to my editor".
• The status shows only on the version where it changed, and Alistair's own notes read as plain words ("Saved while writing", "Moved to Revision").
• An older version opens read-only, so nothing typed into it can overwrite your current text, and "Back to current text" returns to your latest save. Restore keeps your current text as a version first.
• The older-version banner's buttons are no longer hidden behind the right-hand strip.
• Version History works fully from the keyboard: every version is a button, Up and Down move between them, and the actions appear on focus.

Local language models

• Downloads you can trust. A download resumes where it stopped, can be cancelled, shows its speed and time left, and checks there's enough disk space first. An interrupted download no longer shows up as an installed model.
• When no model is set up, Chat offers to choose one you have or download one, and the setup wizard picks a recommended model for your computer's memory.
• Models that come in several files download together and appear once.
• The Model Browser names each file by what it trades off (Balanced, High quality, Best quality), estimates the memory it needs, and warns when it may not fit your computer.
• The Model Browser and the download progress panel now match the rest of Alistair, in light and dark mode.
• Each model answers in its own format. Alistair now lays out every request with the chat template built into the model file, so Llama 3, Gemma, Phi, Qwen and Mistral models all get the format they were trained on. Before, several of them got a generic format and gave noticeably weaker answers.
• AMD and Intel graphics cards can run models. A new GPU engine (about 20 MB) in Settings > Downloads runs language models on AMD Radeon and Intel graphics, usually several times faster than on the processor.
• NVIDIA GPU acceleration works again. A recent update had it silently running on the processor. If you use an NVIDIA card, Settings > Downloads will ask you to download the GPU package once more.
• Long chats and long passages no longer fail. Alistair keeps each request within what the model can read: the oldest messages and story excerpts make room first, and a passage that's too long on its own says so.
• Clearer messages when something goes wrong: not enough memory, a request that's too long, or a processor too old to run local models (most from before 2015).
• Models use as many processor cores as help, a longer memory of the conversation when your computer has room for it, and prose-friendly settings that avoid stiff, repetitive wording.
• Faster when you switch features. Going back to the chat after an Analyze, or between the chat and an interview, no longer re-reads the whole conversation: on the processor, about 3 seconds instead of 40.
• Keep model loaded in Settings > Downloads: unload an unused model after 5, 10 or 30 minutes, or keep it loaded until Alistair closes. Opening the chat loads it again in the background.
• Character interviews know the story. A character answers from their sheet, relationships, factions, the lore they took part in, earlier saved interviews, and the manuscript passages that mention them. Pick a focus (their past, how they talk, a relationship, a scene, or rehearsing a conversation), save an interview to Notes, and long interviews stay consistent with what was said 20 questions earlier.
• Chat: Practice sets a short exercise or gives feedback on your attempt, and Questions asks you pointed questions, beside Draft and Dialogue. The empty chat suggests questions to start with.

Your projects and backups

• Automatic backups. Settings > Data zips every project each day or week into a folder you choose, such as another drive or a folder a cloud service syncs. Keep the newest 5 to 50, back up any time, and restore a project from any backup as a separate copy.
• Moving your projects folder moves your projects. Choosing a new folder offers to move them there (each one is copied and checked before the original is removed), or to use a folder that already holds projects. Before, projects were left behind and seemed to disappear.
• Settings > Data shows where everything is kept (projects, backups, templates, recordings, voices, saved speech, models, logs), with Open and Copy for each.
• With a custom projects folder, character interviews and the chat's knowledge of your story now find your projects. A folder that isn't available, such as an unplugged drive, is reported instead of quietly replaced.

Custom templates

• Documents look like the builder. Rich text, dates, statuses, multi-selects, toggles, images, headings, notes, sections and columns now appear in documents made from your templates; several were missing before. Dates and multi-select choices now save.
• Edit a template, and its documents follow. Documents use the template as it is now; a field you remove keeps its value and shows it again if you bring the field back.
• Your templates survive updates. They're now kept with your projects' data; ones saved by earlier versions move there on their own.
• New fields: Link (pick a character, location, faction, scene and more, and open it) and Long Text. Rich text has bold, italic and lists. Fields can have default values, numbers a range, and you choose which field names the document.
• Start from an example (Magic Item, Ship, Spell, Creature, Timeline Event, Language), see how many documents use each template, and make a new document from a template's card. Every built-in template is listed too.
• Importing a template shows what's in it first, and offers to import it as a copy when you already have one with the same name. Templates shared by others run sealed off from your projects and files.
• Undo now covers a template's name, folder and icon, and closing the builder with unsaved changes asks first.
• Linked documents. When a document made from your template links to a character, place or anything else, that document's sheet shows it in a new Linked documents section (on a character, in World & Links): "Ship · The Grey Heron · Captain". Click to open it.
• Links picks several documents at once, such as a ship's crew.
• Table view lists every document made from a template, one row each, with editable cells and sorting by any column.
• Character interviews know what your records say about the character, and the chat knows a record you mention by name. Deleting a document warns when others link to it, map locations list what's linked there, and scenes can mark paragraphs that name a record.
• Fixed: saving a document made from a template right after viewing a character could save its name and values over that character.
• Fixed: on the World Map, lines between a place and the places inside it could run off across the whole map, carrying bends from another project's map (or bends placed before the cards moved).

Text to Speech

• Saved speech. Speech you've played is kept, so replaying a scene or an audiobook chapter starts instantly. Changing a word, the voice or the speed always makes new audio. Up to 1 GB; see or clear it in Settings > Text to Speech.

Safety and privacy

• Questions and messages use Alistair's own dialogs instead of browser pop-ups that froze the window.
• Clear Cache no longer deletes your settings, dictionary, or crash-recovery copies; it only clears what Alistair can rebuild.

Getting started

• The welcome tour now covers the formatting toolbar, page view, and writing hints, and its text matches the current app (the Atlas tab, auto-save, versions, Writing Tools, and model setup).

Compiler

• Long chapters no longer lose text in the PDF preview and print. Pagination used to stop partway through very long chapters.
• Scene breaks now appear in the compiled manuscript, centred.
• A paragraph longer than a page now continues on the next page. Before, the part that didn't fit was cut off in the preview and the PDF.

Analysis

• Continuity Checker quotes no longer show stray web codes (like  ), and an ordinary word before a hair or eye colour ("her long, tangled black hair") is no longer mistaken for a character's name.
• Kill Your Darlings count pills sit side by side instead of stacking in a column.

v1.2.3

September 2026 Release

Screenplay

• Import a .fountain or .md file straight into a new project: pick Screenplay in the Import wizard and point it at a .fountain file, and Alistair builds the whole project shell around it immediately — no chapter-by-chapter preview step, since a screenplay is one structured document rather than a list to select and rename.
• New "Acronyms" back-matter template: a flat abbreviation/expansion list, deliberately lighter than Glossary's fuller term + category + definition shape — matching how published scripts and books separate a plain "List of Abbreviations" from a full glossary. Available in both Screenplay and Manuscript Back Matter.
• Screenplay projects now include a Drafting folder with a Storyboard document — its Characters and World tabs work exactly like they do in Manuscript, since both just read the Character and World Building documents every project type already has. Timeline stays Manuscript-only, since it depends on per-scene Story Elements tagging Screenplay doesn't have.
• Dialogue View now works on Screenplay sequences, not just Manuscript scenes — speaker is always resolved directly from the structured Character/Dialogue elements instead of guessed from prose dialogue tags.
• New: Character Spotlight in Dialogue View — click any speaker to dim every other line in the open editor and read just theirs, in both Manuscript and Screenplay. Click a different character to re-target directly, or click the same one again to turn it off.
• Fountain import and export now round-trip dual dialogue (the ^ marker) without losing it, and preserve synopsis (=) and section (#) lines that used to get silently folded away on import.
• Fixed: opening any right-panel tab (Dialogue View, Comments, Characters, and the rest) while a Sequence document was open hid the entire editor toolbar for good.
• Fixed: the "(CONTINUED)" marker at the bottom of a screenplay page sat flush against the physical page edge instead of inside the real 1" margin every other page element respects.
• Tightened a small extra gap in the scene-heading location field and the character-cue name field, left over from stacking a typing buffer and field padding on top of each other.

Manuscript Compiler

• Fixed: Glossary was fully built but never actually reachable from the Back Matter folder in either project type.
• "Ack" in the compiler's Structure tab is now spelled out as "Acknowledgments."

Editor

• Undo/redo (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y) now correctly refreshes cast-mark brackets, the long-sentence/passive-voice/dialogue-tag highlights, and the word count — they used to go stale specifically after an undo or redo, until the next real edit.
• Fixed a long-sentence highlight code path that ignored its own on/off setting, tinting paragraphs even when the hint was turned off.
• Removed the blue grammar-error squiggle — detection and the right-click suggestion menu still work, just visually quieter.
• Creating a new document (scene, sequence, character sheet, and so on) now opens it immediately in its own tab instead of just adding it to the folder list.

macOS

• Mac builds are now properly code-signed and notarized with a real Apple Developer ID — no more Gatekeeper warnings on a fresh install.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a race between the update installer and the app's own shutdown routine that could report "Alistair is still running, please close it and try again" even though it wasn't; the update banner and Settings panel now also correctly say "Install & Restart" instead of the old "Download Update" copy.
• Writing streak, best streak, today's word count, and the full activity heatmap were lost on project export/import — they now persist in the project file itself instead of only living in local browser storage.

v1.2.2

September 2026 Release

Character & Location Sheets

• Quick-jump section navigation: a sticky row of section links at the top of every character and location sheet (Physical, Background, Personality, Relationships, Arc, Notes on characters; Overview, Details, Lore, Notes on locations) — click one to jump straight there, and the row highlights whichever section you're currently scrolled to.
• Location sheets now use the same two-column layout as character sheets, roughly halving how far you have to scroll to see everything.
• Jump straight to the map or story board: a "World Map" button on location sheets and a "Storyboard" button on character sheets take you directly from an entity's sheet to where it's visualized, instead of navigating there manually.
• Character Arc now shows a visual step sequence — Beginning → Conflict → Transformation → End — instead of two plain, unlabeled rows of fields.
• Widened character, location, and world-building sheets for more comfortable editing on larger screens.

Interface Polish

• Pass over every document template for visual consistency: square corners throughout, flatter buttons and cards, and higher-contrast text in places it had gotten too faint to read comfortably.
• The Template Manager button no longer shows on the welcome screen, where it couldn't actually do anything until a project was open.

v1.2.1

September 2026 Release

Verified Writing

• Tamper-evident authorship history: every project automatically keeps a per-project hash chain that records word-count growth, save timestamps, and paste-character counts on every autosave and manual save, so you can show a publisher or agent real evidence a manuscript was actually written over time rather than generated wholesale. Always on, nothing to turn on; a project that existed before this feature picks up tracking from that day's word count on its next save, not a false claim of continuity back to page one.
• Pacing & Analytics panel: its own section on Project Home shows the ledger by default, no click required, with a word-growth sparkline, entry count, tracking date range, and a one-glance verify status.
• Milestones & Replay: flag any manual save as a milestone the same way you already lock a version, and jump into a real before/after diff of any manual checkpoint for the document you have open.
• Signed Authorship Report export: builds a signed JSON report (full ledger, per-document word-growth curves, paste statistics, a plain-English summary) that anyone can check independently, with no Alistair install required, via a small standalone verifier script.
• Verify Report, built into Alistair: a new "Verify Report" action (sidebar and welcome screen, no project needs to be open) lets anyone already running Alistair check a report's signature and chain integrity in a couple of clicks instead of using the standalone script.
• This is a tamper-evident record, not tamper-proof: it proves the recorded history is internally consistent, not that it's the only history that could ever have existed. It never looks at what you typed and never tracks which tools you used to write it, only that the words grew, over time, the way real writing does.

Version Control

• Autosave now creates real recovery snapshots: previously, only a manual save ever created a full-content version snapshot, so hours of autosaved-but-never-manually-saved writing had no recovery point if something went wrong. Autosave now occasionally snapshots too, gated by word-count delta or elapsed time so it stays cheap.
• Fixed a document-version-snapshot endpoint that was missing for root-level documents (outside any folder), which had been silently failing.

macOS

• Corrected lingering "coming soon" language for macOS on the Getting Started page, which had fallen out of sync with the actual Mac release.

v1.2.0

August 2026 Release

v1.1.9 was skipped — Screenplay was a big enough addition to warrant a minor version bump instead.

Screenplay

• Real shared toolbar: the Screenplay editor now uses the exact same toolbar every other document type does — title, status, tags, Save, Export, and real Version History — instead of a separate lookalike. Row B swaps in an element-type button group (Scene / Action / Character / Parenthetical / Dialogue / Transition) in place of the prose-only formatting controls.
• Element-type keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl/Cmd+1 through 6 set the current line's type without reaching for the toolbar.
• Corrected page margins: the live editor was rendering Scene Heading, Action, and Transition text flush against the physical page edge instead of the real 1.5"/1" industry margins. Fixed to match the compiled PDF exactly.
• Character cue indent corrected: moved from 3.7" to 3.5", verified against both a real produced shooting script and published formatting guides.
• Stackable character extensions: (V.O.), (O.S.), and (O.C.) can now be combined with (CONT'D) on the same cue — e.g. "MARY (O.S.) (CONT'D)" — instead of only one or the other.
• Real page numbers: the compiled PDF now paginates into true discrete pages (instead of one continuously-flowing document) and stamps "N." flush-right on every page from page 2 onward, matching standard screenplay convention.
• (CONTINUED) / (MORE) markers: when a scene or a character's dialogue is split across a page break, the compiled PDF now marks it on both sides the way a real script does.
• Production-style scene numbers: when scene numbering is enabled, numbers now flank the slug line in the left and right margins instead of sitting inline with the heading text.
• Character/Location autocomplete now reads your actual sheets: typing a scene heading or character cue now suggests names from the Character and Location documents you've already created, not just names already typed elsewhere in the script.
• Character & Location List: the Screenplay Compiler has a new panel that auto-derives a cast and location list straight from your scenes, with an option to include it as an appendix page.
• No more dead-end "Drafting" folder: Screenplay projects no longer get a Drafting folder whose Storyboard/Story Arc tools depended on Manuscript-only scene data and never had anything to show.
• Fixed clipped/misaligned fields: the Scene Heading and Character line's INT/EXT, Time-of-Day, and Extension pickers were native dropdowns that clipped their own selected text ("CONTINUOUS" showing as "CONTINUOU") and left dead gaps for short values. Replaced with the same click-to-open picker style already used for Location/Character Name, and the text fields themselves now size to their real rendered width instead of a fixed default.
• Scene number locking: a new "Lock scene numbers" option in the Screenplay Compiler makes numbers permanent across recompiles — a scene added later gets a letter-prefixed number (A6, B6…) instead of shifting every page after it, matching how a distributed shooting script is actually renumbered.
• Revision header: an optional "TITLE - REVISION LABEL" line in the top margin of every compiled page, alongside the page number.
• Live compiled preview: the Screenplay Compiler now shows an always-current preview of the actual compiled pages as you change settings, instead of only finding out what you'll get after exporting.
• Compiler layout matches the rest of Alistair: Sequences and Format are now toolbar tabs that open as an overlay over the preview — the same pattern the Manuscript Compiler already uses — instead of a fixed settings sidebar.
• Fixed the "blank project" banner sticking around: the project home screen's word/scene counts (and the "this project is a blank page" banner) only ever recognized Manuscript scenes, so a Screenplay project with real content still looked empty. Screenplay documents are now counted correctly.
• Onboarding tour updated: removed two steps that pointed at controls hidden in Screenplay mode, corrected the export step's wording, and added a new step introducing the element-type buttons and their keyboard shortcuts.
• Font quick-select: pick Courier Prime, Courier Final Draft, or Courier New for the compiled script right from the Format tab, with an automatic fallback to a system Courier if the chosen one isn't installed.
• Fixed title page centering: the title and author block was centered within its own fixed-height box, but that box sat flush at the top of the page instead of the middle — so it read as noticeably off-center. Now centers within the full page.
• Fountain and Final Draft (.fdx) export from the Compiler: export your entire compiled script (every included Sequence, in compiler order) as a plain-text Fountain file or a Final Draft-compatible .fdx file, alongside the existing PDF export.

Manuscript Compiler

• EPUB export: compile your manuscript straight to a real, reflowable EPUB e-book, alongside the existing PDF and DOCX export. Title, author, and cover image are pulled automatically from your Manuscript Cover page, no separate upload step.
• Live EPUB preview: a new EPUB Preview tab shows the actual reflowed e-book output next to Print Preview, deliberately not page-simulated, so what you see is genuinely how an e-reader will lay it out.
• Auto-numbered chapters ("Chapter 1", "Chapter 2"…) now apply consistently across Print, DOCX, and EPUB, leaving prologues, epilogues, and interludes untouched.

Text to Speech

• New toolbar button: Text to Speech now has its own button in the main app toolbar, so you can read text aloud without opening a document first.

Rhythm (formerly Prosody)

• Restored and renamed: the panel had been silently disabled for every project since Chapbook was folded into Manuscript. It's back, and renamed from "Prosody" to "Rhythm" — the old name is a poetry-only term and no longer described what the panel actually covers.
• New Prose Rhythm mode (Manuscript): a sentence-length heatmap, average sentence length, a variation score, repeated-sentence-opener detection, estimated silent read-aloud time, and a dialogue-vs-narration ratio — the prose analogue of poetic meter, not meter itself.
• New Screenplay Pacing mode: per-scene length bars, dialogue density, and character screen-time, derived directly from the elements already in your script.
• The original meter, rhyme scheme, and syllable-count tool is preserved as a secondary "Poem" tab within Manuscript projects.
• Redesigned to match the rest of Alistair's right-panel style (Characters, Locations, Story Elements) — a proper panel header, collapsible sections, and the same filter-pill tabs, instead of a bespoke card layout.

v1.1.8

August 2026 Release

macOS

• Automatic updates now work on Mac: Alistair can download and install its own updates on macOS instead of only pointing you to a manual download page. The first install still needs a one-time Gatekeeper approval (right-click, Open), since that step needs a paid Apple developer certificate we have chosen not to buy. After that first approval, updates apply on their own.

Settings

• Update banner no longer covers the toolbar: the "a new version is ready" banner used to sit on top of the toolbar buttons underneath it instead of pushing them down. It now properly makes room for itself.
• Honest update button labels: buttons that used to say "Restart Now" or "Restart & Install" now say "Download Update," matching what they actually do. A short note now explains why Mac updates are currently handled this way.
• More settings buttons feel consistent: the license Activate and Deactivate buttons, the Settings close button, and the "Take the Tour" link now use the same gentle hover lift and shadow as the rest of Alistair.
• Guided tour now covers License, Updates, and Data: the Settings walkthrough used to stop after Workflows. It now continues through the three tabs it used to skip.

Templates & Editors

• Consistent button styling across every template: the Compiler, Picture Book Compiler, Scrapbook, Review tools, World Map Generator, Character Relationships Map, and every front and back matter template (including the Picture Book set) now share the same square corners, soft shadow, and hover lift used throughout Alistair.
• Front and back matter forms now match their preview height: the form on the left used to sometimes end up a different height than the preview page on the right. It now always matches, and scrolls inside itself if your fields run long.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed auto-save silently failing on every field of the Author Bio template, caused by a call to a method that did not exist.
• Fixed the Author Bio template's preview rendering at a mismatched height compared to every other back matter template.

v1.1.7

August 2026 Release

World Map

• Story mode journey trails reworked: journeys now draw as straight lines instead of curves. Right-click anywhere on a line to add a bend point, drag it to reshape the route, right-click a bend point to remove it — the same direct-manipulation editing you'd expect from a real drawing tool. Two characters sharing the exact same route now automatically offset into parallel lines so neither can end up hidden behind the other, with no manual fix required.
• Location connections are now 100% derived from your story: every line between locations is a real Parent Location relationship read straight from that location's own document — never a hand-drawn, purely cosmetic connection. "Draw Connections" mode has been removed; set or change a location's parent from its own document, the way every other piece of story data in Alistair already works. The curved/straight line toggle is gone too — location connections are always straight (or bent via the same waypoint editing journey trails use).
• New "Up to" scrubber for Location mode: drag the scrubber to any point in your manuscript and locations not yet mentioned in a scene dim out (rather than vanish, so their position on the map stays visible for context), with connections to or from them hidden entirely. See your world exactly as introduced so far, not the whole thing at once.
• Locations panel replaces the old show/hide dropdown: individual locations now toggle on and off from a proper panel list (matching Story mode's Characters legend) instead of a dropdown menu, using each location's own color.
• Bigger, better-centered leg-number badges and character journey markers — both were easy to misread at their old size. Badges now also swerve out of the way if a waypoint bend point would otherwise sit directly on top of one.
• Fixed a stray "extra path" artifact that could appear at a sharp bend in a journey line.

Welcome Screen

• Book-cover project cards: the project list is now a grid of book covers instead of a plain row list. No cover uploaded yet? Alistair generates a clean one from your project's title and author. Right-click any project to upload your own cover image, pick a color, or set the author byline from the new Edit Cover dialog.
• Sort control: sort your project grid by Recent, Name, or Type, remembered across launches. The "Continue writing" ribbon always tracks whatever you actually opened last, independent of how the grid below is sorted.

Pacing & Analytics

• Tension Arc chart: replaces the old dialogue-vs-tension scatter with a line chart of tension across your manuscript in scene order — the classic story pacing curve. See at a glance whether tension actually climbs toward your climax, or whether three high-tension scenes land back to back with no breather in between.
• Removed a redundant "Re-analyse" button from inside the analytics panel — the refresh button in the panel's header already does the same thing.

Scrapbook

• Masonry grid layout: scrapped lines now lay out in a multi-column waterfall grid instead of a single narrow column, so it reads more like a collected board of clippings and makes better use of a wide window.
• Group by scene: a new Recent / By Scene toggle lets you cluster your scraps by whichever scene they were cut from, instead of always a flat chronological list.

Bug Fixes

• The left panel's folder flyout is now anchored to a fixed, predictable position with proper internal scrolling for long folders, instead of occasionally drifting off-screen or clipping content with no way to reach it.
• Grammar checking no longer flags a character's own vocabulary as "considered offensive" — an author gets to write the words the story calls for.

v1.1.6

August 2026 Release

macOS Release

• Alistair is now available natively on Mac (Apple Silicon). Download it from the Download page.
• Apple Metal GPU acceleration: local LLM chat automatically detects and uses your Mac's GPU via Metal — no drivers or extra downloads, matching the CUDA acceleration already available on Windows.
• Fixed the inspector panel's tool icons being unreachable on shorter windows — the panel now scrolls instead of clipping them off-screen.
• Fixed the "Create New Document" dialog appearing off-center when the window wasn't in full screen.

LLM/ML Chat

• Smoother streaming: chat responses now render at a smoothed, typewriter pace instead of the raw jitter of individual tokens arriving over the network.
• Read Aloud for chat: every assistant message now has a speaker button that reads it aloud with your default TTS voice, playing quietly in the background without opening the TTS panel (that stays reserved for reading scenes). Fixed it being missing from hover actions on chat sessions restored after relaunch.

Aliases & Story Elements

• Alias chips: character and location sheets now manage alternate names (nicknames, last names, titles) as removable chips instead of a raw comma-separated field. Any alias is recognized in your scenes as the same entity instead of creating a duplicate.
• Rename-safe: renaming a character or location sheet now offers to alias the old name and migrates every existing scene's Story Elements data (cast, moods, locations, relationships) to the new name — so a rename no longer splits a character into two disconnected identities across World Map and Storyboard.
• Alias Manager: a new toolbar button and modal (mirrors the Dictionary manager) for reviewing and editing aliases project-wide, with right-click "Link to Character/Location…" from any selected text in a scene. Edits made here now stay in sync with an already-open character/location sheet instead of risking a stale autosave reverting them.
• Local cast detection: known characters mentioned in the open scene are now suggested as one-click "add to scene" Story Elements entries instantly, no LLM call required — the LLM scan is still there for genuinely new entities plus mood/time detection.
• Relationship cross-linking: picking a character for a scene's relationship entry now prefills the relationship type from that character's own sheet-level relationships when the other character is already in the scene, instead of redeclaring "siblings" every time.

World Building

• Population, Climate, and Governing Faction/Owner fields added to location sheets, now surfaced directly in World Map node tooltips.
• Editable journey colors: character journey trail, marker, and location-pill colors on the World Map's Story mode are now editable by clicking them, with the color picker no longer opening off-screen.
• Fixed the Locations / Story / Map mode toggle silently failing partway through a switch.

Storyboard & Compiler

• Storyboard cards now show real data: scene cards display your actual Story Elements (character/location chips, live word count, status) instead of a disconnected shadow copy of POV/Setting/Conflict fields that never saved correctly. The unused Beat field is gone, and cards are restyled to match the rest of the app.
• New "Continuation" scene type for the compiler: continues the previous chapter with a small scene-break mark instead of a new chapter heading.
• Fixed scene type never actually being saved after initial document creation — it's now a real, persisted field editable from the toolbar at any time.
• Fixed Prologue/Epilogue/Interlude special headings failing to render in the compiled manuscript due to a case-sensitivity bug.

Left Rail & Binder

• A dedicated "Add New" folder button is now pinned to the bottom of the left rail, replacing a flyout row that could silently create folders at the project root.
• Right-click a rail folder to rename or delete it (built-in folders stay protected); the context menu now matches the app's square, accent-hover styling and no longer renders off-screen near a window edge.
• The document flyout's right-click menu gained Change Status, Change Scene Type, and Change Tags (with inline tag creation) alongside Delete — status shows as a subtle row tint, scene type as its real icon, tags as color dots. Fixed these submenus closing the whole flyout instead of opening.

Bug Fixes

• Character, location, and world-building sheets could get stuck showing "Auto-saving…" forever after an edit — the save confirmation was being sent to a stale reference instead of the sheet that actually requested it. Location/world-building saves were also being processed twice by two separate save handlers at once; now only one runs.
• The character sheet showed "Auto-saving…" from the moment it loaded, before any edit or save had happened.
• The alias chip input on character/location sheets could sit slightly out of alignment with the field above it when no aliases existed yet.
• Widened cramped input fields on character/location sheets (Height/Build/Hair/Eyes and similar rows) so they reflow properly instead of being squeezed into fixed narrow columns, especially inside the Characters/World Building quick-reference side panel.

v1.1.5

July 2026 Release

New Features

• Scrapbook: cut a passage you're not sure about right from the scene editor, select it, right-click, and choose "Scrap Selection," and it's saved to a running Scrapbook instead of being lost for good. The text leaves the scene immediately (undo still works as normal), and each entry keeps its source scene, word count, and a timestamp so you always know where it came from and can jump back to that scene in one click. The Scrapbook is created automatically the first time you scrap something and stays up to date even if you're scrapping from several scenes across open tabs.

Picture Book Improvements

• Zoomable, pannable spread canvas: the spread editor's canvas now works like Storyboard's: zoom in and out with the toolbar buttons or Ctrl/Cmd + scroll, and click-drag anywhere on the empty canvas to pan around. Handy for zooming in close to check fine detail or pulling back to see the whole spread at a glance. Zooming only changes what you see on screen; the actual font sizes and image dimensions in your spread never change.
• Print-to-PDF now splits every spread correctly: exporting a picture book to PDF now produces two physical pages per spread, split right down the centre gutter, matching how a real printed book actually binds instead of squeezing both facing pages onto one sheet.
• Trim sizes now match real printer paper: the page-size options in the spread editor are now standard home/office paper sizes (US Letter by default, A4, and A5) instead of publishing-industry trim sizes. Because the exported PDF's physical page size is read directly from your book's own trim, printing at home needs no scaling or letterboxing: what you design is exactly what comes out of the printer.
• Split-image mode fixed: placing two separate images side-by-side across a spread (one per page) no longer shows a blank/white background where the empty-image placeholder pattern should be.
• Illustration Brief simplified: removed the Setting, Focal Point, and Page-Turn Hook fields to keep the brief focused on what illustrators actually need: characters & action, composition, and colour palette.

UI Polish

• Toolbar & panel icons are more visible: icons in the left/right activity strips and the top editor toolbar (Chat, Templates, Settings) were rendering in a faded, low-contrast colour at rest. They now use the app's normal text colour, with the accent colour reserved for hover and active states.
• Google Fonts manager moved out of the toolbar: your added Google Fonts no longer sit as a permanent row of chips in the shared formatting toolbar. They're selectable from the Font dropdown as before, and a new "Manage Google Fonts…" option opens a small popover for removing ones you no longer need.
• Fixed the "Add Google Font" dialog: the option to add a new Google Font by name or URL previously opened a browser prompt that didn't render in some setups, so nothing appeared to happen. It now opens a proper in-app dialog, matching the rest of Alistair's rename/create dialogs.

Voice & TTS

• Voice cloning quality upgrade: the underlying voice-cloning model has been upgraded to a newer, cleaner-sounding version with an improved vocoder, producing noticeably crisper cloned audio.
• Fixed voice blending sounding like two overlapping voices: blending two voices, including a cloned voice blended with one of the built-in voices, now produces a single coherent voice instead of an "overlaid," duet-like effect.
• Fixed clipped first word in generated speech: TTS playback occasionally cut off or rushed through the first word of a line; audio trimming now preserves quiet-but-real speech at the start and end of a clip instead of mistaking it for silence.
• Faster, more stable TTS generation: fixed an issue where certain voices could silently fall back to a much slower, memory-heavy audio processing path, which in rare cases could make the app become unresponsive while generating speech.

Performance

• Quieter startup: Alistair no longer checks the local text-to-speech server's status on every launch. That check now only happens the first time you open the TTS panel, removing unnecessary connection attempts (and console noise) for anyone who hasn't set up voice cloning.
• Faster project search and TTS voice loading: searching across every document in a project, and loading your saved TTS voices, now fetch in parallel instead of one at a time.
• More resilient project saves: a broad pass over the project-saving backend now protects every metadata write (scenes, folders, documents, project settings) with file locking and atomic writes, preventing rare data corruption if two saves happen at the same moment.

Bug Fixes

• Character Relationships Map: toolbar buttons (zoom, center view, etc.) no longer show a stray dotted outline after being clicked, and the zoom in/out buttons have a larger, easier-to-hit click area.
• Fixed an error in the Google Font manager that could silently prevent a newly added font from being saved or appearing in your font list.
• Clicking away from the folder flyout menu in the left panel now reliably closes it.
• Fixed "Continue where you left off" on the welcome screen sometimes abandoning you at the project home screen instead of reopening the document you were last working on.

v1.1.4

July 2026 Release

Feature Improvements

• Continuity Checker — quote excerpts: every issue card now shows the exact sentence from your manuscript where the value was found, not just a scene reference. Green "verified" cards confirm attributes that are consistent across the whole draft; red cards show the conflicting values side by side with the surrounding prose so you can fix the right passage without hunting for it.
• Continuity Checker — verified section: consistent attributes (one unique value across all scenes) now appear as a separate green "verified" list below the issues, letting you confirm at a glance that key character and location details are holding steady as your draft grows.
• Template Manager visual refresh: the custom template library is now displayed as a colour-coded card grid. Each template card shows its category (general, character, world, front matter, visual) with a matching accent colour on the card border, badge, and hover shadow. Cards animate in with a staggered entry and hover with a shadow-only lift that matches the rest of the Alistair interface.
• Kill Your Darlings colour update: the KYD panel accent colour has been updated from orange to the app's accent blue throughout: issue type badges, the context block highlight, and the Accept button now match the rest of the interface.

UI Cleanup

• Story Elements: removed duplicate continuity button: the "Check for continuity issues" quick-action button has been removed from the Story Elements right panel since the Continuity Checker is already its own dedicated panel. The panel is cleaner and the canonical entry point is unchanged.

Editor Improvements

• Shared toolbar font size & line height persist across scenes: font size and line height set in the shared toolbar now stick when switching between documents. Opening a new scene no longer resets the toolbar back to the document's saved value; the shared setting is always applied on load.
• Auto-save on by default: new installs now have auto-save enabled out of the box. The setting only applies on first launch; existing users with it turned off are unaffected.

Bug Fixes

• Shared toolbar font size was displaying as 12 pt on first open due to an invalid stored default; it now always shows the correct point size.
• Formatting applied via the shared toolbar now correctly targets all paragraph elements, including those the editor creates as block-level divs when pressing Enter in a fresh scene.

v1.1.3

June 2026 Release

World Building

• Story Journey: Switching the world map to Story mode now hides parent-child hierarchy arrows and manual connection lines entirely. Only character journey trails are shown, letting you focus on where characters travel, start, and end up without structural geography cluttering the canvas.
• World Map Creation: Draw and shape your world's geography directly inside Alistair. Paint continents freehand, generate terrain with rivers, coastlines, slopes, and region labels, place cities and towns, and export your finished map as a clean SVG, all without leaving your project.

Bug Fixes

• Connection legend items in the bottom status bar now lay out in a single horizontal row instead of stacking vertically and growing the bar height.

v1.1.2

May 2026 Release

Editor Improvements

• Dialogue & Thought style buttons: the style ribbon now has distinct Dialogue (external, spoken) and Thought (internal) buttons. The ribbon auto-detects which applies: when the caret is in a paragraph whose first non-whitespace character is a double quote the Dialogue button lights up as a hint; a single quote lights up Thought, making it easy to apply the right style without hunting for it.
• Strikethrough & Clear Formatting: two new buttons in the shared formatting toolbar: one for strikethrough text, one to strip all inline formatting from the selection in a single click.
• Smart Quotes & Autocorrect toggles: per-session toggle buttons in the formatting toolbar let you enable or disable autocorrect and smart quotes on the fly without opening Settings.

UI & Navigation

• Toolbar wrapping: both the formatting toolbar and the document header toolbar (title, word count, Save/Versions/Export) now wrap gracefully at narrow window widths instead of overflowing and cutting off buttons.

Bug Fixes

• Strikethrough and Clear Formatting toolbar buttons now correctly fire their commands when clicked.
• Smart quotes no longer throw a runtime error when triggered with no active text selection.
• Pressing ESC while a modal (export, shortcuts, comments, style editor) is open no longer also exits composition mode.
• Comments visibility now correctly restores its saved state when a document is loaded.

v1.1.1

May 2026 Release

New Features

• Kill Your Darlings: offline prose scanner that surfaces candidates for cutting: redundant phrases, adverb clusters, passive constructions, filler words, overlong sentences, and clichés. Issues are colour-coded by type and displayed with a ±55-character context snippet; click any result to jump directly to that passage in the editor. Findings can be accepted as inline comments for deferred review or dismissed in one click. Runs entirely on device with no model download required.
• Dialogue-Only View: extracts all spoken dialogue from the current scene, detects speakers using attribution tags and surrounding context, and colour-codes each character's lines with a persistent per-project palette. A beats toggle shows or hides the action and description lines between exchanges. Click any dialogue card to navigate to that exact passage in the editor. Useful for reading voice consistency, spotting over-long exchanges, and auditing how much page time each character holds.
• Onboarding Tutorial: a guided walkthrough for new users that introduces the core workflow: creating a project, opening the editor, and navigating the binder. Steps are contextual and non-intrusive: each prompt appears only when the relevant area of the app is visible. The tutorial can be replayed at any time from Settings and is dismissed permanently once completed.
• Home Screen Project Metrics: the project home screen is now a full writing dashboard. Stat cards show total words, scene count, today's word count with a doughnut progress ring, and current day streak with a flame indicator. A GitHub-style activity heatmap covers the full calendar year (Jan–Dec) with emerald intensity scaling to your daily goal. The Pacing & Analytics section features KPI cards (total words, avg tension, read time), a dialogue-versus-tension quadrant chart with per-scene colour-coded bubbles, a per-scene word-count bar chart, and a full scene breakdown table. Recent Documents and Restore Workflow sit in a quick-access row directly above analytics.
• TTS Per-Character Voice Assignment: assign a saved voice blend to any named character. When reading aloud, the TTS engine automatically switches to that character's voice each time their dialogue is spoken, with no manual switching required. Voice assignments are configured in the Dialogue-Only panel and persist with the project.
• Storyboard Scene Cards: the Storyboard's Board tab now shows collapsible scene cards with story elements at a glance: tension level, POV, dialogue ratio, and key beats, making it the canonical home for scene-level story planning. The separate Cards inspector panel has been removed in favour of this unified view.

Feature Improvements

• Inspector panel renamed to TODO: the "Suggestions" inspector panel is now labelled "TODO" throughout the app: clearer name, same capture workflow.

Bug Fixes

• Workflow save and restore now correctly resolve API paths; saved sessions appear on the home screen and restore in one click.
• Lucide icons in stat cards and the scene editor toolbar are now rendered at their declared pixel size, eliminating blurry or over-scaled icons.

v1.1.0

April 2026 Release

New Features

• Continuity Checker: rule-based offline scanner that detects character attribute contradictions (eye colour, hair, age), location direction conflicts, and name spelling variants via Levenshtein distance. Appears as a tile in the scene home grid; results display in the right panel. No LLM required: it runs entirely on your machine with no model download.
• Writing Goals & Session Tracker: set a daily word goal and track it with a doughnut progress indicator, 7-day history chart, and streak counter. A slim 4 px collapsible progress bar lives in the shared toolbar and can be toggled via the inline word-count button. All history persists locally.
• "Appears In" Character Index: each character card now has a collapsible "Appears In" section listing every manuscript scene that mentions the character's name, with scene title, word count, and a text excerpt around the mention. Results cache locally; a Re-Scan button forces a fresh pass when needed.
• Collaboration Annotations: share your work with readers or editors and receive inline annotations without touching the manuscript. Export selected documents as a .alistair-review bundle in two clicks. The reviewer opens the bundle in their own copy of Alistair, reads in a read-only overlay, selects text, and adds typed annotations (comment, suggestion, or question). The author imports the returned bundle through a merge dialog that shows each annotation's anchor status (matched / fuzzy / unresolvable), lets them accept or reject, and writes accepted annotations as document comments with a review badge. Re-anchoring handles text edits since export via four-level fuzzy matching. No server, no account: it's entirely file-based.
• Pacing & Analytics Dashboard: per-scene manuscript analytics accessible from the left sidebar. Includes a tension curve (heuristic: punctuation density + short-sentence ratio), words-per-scene bar chart, average dialogue ratio doughnut, POV distribution horizontal bar, and a full scene breakdown table (words, dialogue %, tension %). Re-analyse with one click.
• Character Interview: interview any of your characters directly: the character speaks in first person, grounded entirely in what you have written on their sheet. Two modes: Early Interview (fewer than five fields filled) and In Character (five or more confirmed). For undefined fields, the character responds instinctively (deflecting, going vague, or pushing back) but never invents facts. A Save to Character Sheet button sends the conversation through a local extraction pass, shows a review modal comparing current vs. new values field by field, and writes only the fields you approve.

Feature Improvements

• Real-time token streaming: LLM chat responses now stream token-by-token via SSE; the first token appears in ~1–2 seconds instead of waiting 15–45 seconds for the full response to buffer
• Character card persistence: "Appears In" results persist in localStorage with a timestamp; re-scanning is only triggered when you explicitly request it
• Interview intent routing in chat: typing "interview [character name]" in the LLM chat now routes directly to the character interview feature, and the model never fabricates a fictional session with your actual characters

Bug Fixes

• Lucide SVG icons inside panel tiles and sidebar items now correctly pass click events through to their parent, so clicking on an icon always registers the intended tile action
• Various stability improvements

UI & Navigation Improvements

• Panel keyboard shortcuts: press ` (backtick) anywhere in the app to toggle the left project panel; press Shift+` to toggle the right inspector panel. Both shortcuts are inert while you are typing in the editor or any input field.
• Improved panel handles: both the left and right divider bars now highlight in the accent colour on hover and reveal a directional chevron pill showing which way the panel will collapse. Tooltip text includes the keyboard shortcut hint. When a panel is collapsed the chevron remains faintly visible as a discovery cue.
• Clean welcome screen: the right inspector panel is now always hidden at startup. The workflow restore prompt has been moved from the right panel into a non-intrusive floating card in the bottom-right corner of the welcome screen. It slides in automatically if saved workflows exist and can be dismissed with a single click.
• Left panel always opens on launch: the project browser now resets to open on every launch regardless of how it was left, ensuring your projects are always visible when you start writing.
• Export for Review: scenes only: the Share for Review export dialog now shows only scene/chapter documents, filtering out front matter, back matter, and other non-prose document types. The redesigned picker adds real-time search, status filter chips (All / Draft / Revision / Final), live selection stats (word count, avg per scene, estimated reading time), and a resizable divider between the scene list and settings panels.

v1.0.0

2026 Initial Release

Writing & Editing

• Paginated rich text editor with full formatting toolbar (bold, italic, headings, alignment, lists)
• Composition mode for distraction-free drafting with typewriter scrolling
• Multi-scene split-panel workspace with shared style ribbon applied across all open scenes
• Inline images with drag-to-resize handles and four layout modes (inline, wrap-left, wrap-right, full-width)
• Inline comments with toggle visibility; all project comments load on project open without needing to open a scene
• Tag-based suggestions system with filtering by Characters, Storyboard, Story Arc, World Building, and Notes
• Style ribbon with reusable formatting presets that persist across every scene in a project
• Live paragraph metrics (word count, character count, paragraph count) displayed in the style ribbon as you type
• Find & Replace: non-destructive in-editor search using CSS Custom Highlights (zero DOM mutation, undo history always intact); replace current or replace all
• Drafts and version history with side-by-side diff comparison and one-click restore
• Auto-save with configurable interval and last-saved timestamp indicator
• Import existing .docx and .pdf projects into Alistair

Story Organization

• Drag-and-drop project binder with nested folders and documents
• Scene management with live drag-to-reorder and real-time editor updates
• Front matter and back matter templates (title page, copyright, dedication, acknowledgments, glossary)
• One-click manuscript compiler with PDF and DOCX export and industry-standard formatting defaults
• Character profiles with photo upload, structured templates, relationship mapping, and sidebar reference cards
• Interactive character name autocomplete popup while writing scenes, with per-project toggle
• World-building templates for geography, cultures, history, factions, religions, and magic systems
• Location sheets with photo upload, parent-location hierarchy dropdown, and interactive relationship map
• Live name sync: renaming a character or location updates every Story Elements chip and dropdown across the project instantly
• Storyboard with draggable scene cards and story arc tracking
• Story Elements per-scene metadata (location, time of day, POV character, mood, narrative beats, characters in scene)
• LLM scene scan for extracting missing Story Elements as a reviewable checklist; nothing is inserted without approval
• Story Arc integration: selectively pull any scene metadata and beats into your arc view
• Notes and research management with full version control and rich text editing
• Ideas tile for saving quick text snippets for characters, locations, and plot points
• Custom template builder with visual drag-and-drop designer for fully bespoke document types
• Chapbook project type for poetry with six poetic forms, real-time helper sidebar, and prosody tile (syllable counts, meter detection, rhyme scheme tracking)
• Picture Book project type with spread-by-spread editor (text + illustration panels), double-page preview, illustration staging notes, and picture book compiler

Workspace & Interface

• Multi-tab support with detachable pop-out windows for side-by-side reference and editing
• Floating panel pop-outs: any left-panel tile can be detached as a native OS window with an always-on-top pin
• Workflow Save & Restore: save named workspaces capturing the open project, active document, pop-out windows, and panel layout; restore in one click with an optional startup prompt
• Writing metrics panel with live word count, read time, sentence count, dialogue %, pacing, and paragraph type
• Light, dark, and fully customizable themes with dynamic window theming and color picker
• Fully remappable keybindings with conflict detection scoped per action group

LLM/ML Tools

• Offline LLM chat interface powered by llama.cpp; all inference runs locally, manuscripts never leave the machine
• Manuscript-aware RAG context: indexes actual prose so responses reference real characters, locations, and story content
• Chapter-targeted queries: ask about a specific chapter by name and it retrieves that exact document's content directly
• Source links in chat: responses include clickable scene reference cards with real text excerpts; click to open that scene in the editor
• No-project chat handling: if no project is open, Alistair lists available projects as clickable options before answering
• Analysis by Alistair: inline suggestions surfaced directly in your document with Accept, Dismiss, and Discuss actions
• Bring Your Own Model: import any .gguf quantized model via drag-and-drop or the settings panel
• CUDA GPU acceleration with partial offload support and dynamic performance scaling per model size
• Optimized GPU batch processing for fast prompt ingestion on long manuscript context windows
• Text-to-Speech (100% offline): 26 built-in voices, voice blending at custom ratios, full playback controls (play/pause/seek/speed), read-aloud from selection, WAV export, all powered by a bundled Kokoro ONNX engine with no internet or API key required