Timeline

A timeline is a manual sorting board for the early draft: it checks narrative order, real time and which objects are involved. It never generates events from the script silently, and it never reorders cards you arranged. Open Timeline in the left navigation: the title carries the event count, and one line below reports plotline count, how many events are attached to the script, and points versus ranges.

A project can hold several timelines, each on its own: the main plot, the heroine’s line, the thread behind the scenes. Every line is edited right on the overview—there is no separate focus-editing mode.

“New Plotline” asks for a name and a rendering mode:

• Card Flow (Sequential layout, draggable)—order only.
• Timeline (Physical Scale, Dual Track)—years and duration; on the card this line is labelled Scale Axis.

If you are already sorting eras, create it as a timeline rather than switching afterwards. Existing lines can change name, mode, and axis start and end in Plotline Settings (leave them blank for automatic), or be deleted there.

An empty line says so (“No cards yet.” or the points-and-ranges equivalent); with no lines at all the page tells you where the first button is.

Cards lay out left to right, top to bottom, size to content and wrap. Drag to reorder; the order is the narrative. It carries no time scale—whether “first meeting” and “the alliance” are three months or three years apart is not visible here, and should not be.

Add buttons follow the mode, so you never pick the type twice in a dialog.

The axis is physical: points sit on it as dots and capsules, ranges below it as interval bars with start at the left, name in the middle, end at the right, and tick numbers along the axis itself.

• Default is 100% overview. With room to scroll: wheel or trackpad moves sideways, Shift + wheel zooms 100%–600% around the pointer, and the bottom slider follows. At the edges or in overview, vertical wheeling is handed back to the page so the axis never swallows your scroll.
• Drag to adjust: points snap to whole coordinates; dragging a range’s middle moves it, dragging either end changes start or end, with a minimum of one whole unit. Nothing writes while you drag—the value lands on release, and a tap still opens the detail.
• Ranges do not default to one per row: non-overlapping ones share a row, and only real horizontal overlap pushes a new row. You can drag a range to another row; the landing point is corrected, so a row never holds two overlapping ranges.
• Double-click empty axis space to add—separately for a time point and a time range—and the default span is pushed back inside the visible range, so a new event is never “created but invisible”.

Card height grows with content: more cards or more stacked rows lengthen the card downward instead of crushing nodes into a fixed box.

Cards, points and ranges can all carry a Location: a chapter, scene, scene setting or content block (or none). The timeline stores the reference, not a copy of the text, and Jump to Script returns you to that spot.

Affected Objects—characters, places, props, settings—are recorded separately. The picker pins what you selected at the top with a small category mark, keeps the four categories collapsed with a “selected / total” count in their headers, and filters by name and alias from the search box, so a long roster cannot stretch the dialog beyond use. The description still accepts @ mentions.

The two serve different purposes: affected objects are relations you confirmed, used for filtering, summaries and AI context; @ is for jumping while reading. Neither infers causality, and neither counts who was on stage.

“Move the alliance after chapter three”, “give the heroine’s line a skeleton from exile to reunion”—the agent answers with a confirmation card: create or change a plotline (name, colour, mode, axis range) and create, change or delete events (lane, title, note, location, affected and linked objects, span times, linked scene location).

Validation is hard at the runtime: a location must point at a chapter / scene / scene setting / block that really exists at a consistent level; a range must end after it starts; deleting a line cascades to its events and the card states how many. Confirm once, undo once for the whole card. “Let AI reorganise an entire timeline” is not part of this.

Creating and editing validate in place; nothing fails silently:

• “Please enter the event title first.” / a missing start coordinate / a missing end coordinate / “End coordinate must be greater than start coordinate.”
• One card cannot both create a line and hang a new event on that brand-new line: the line’s id only exists after it is stored. Do it in two steps.
• Card flow and the scale axis show the same content, but their geometry never converts: switching invents no points and turns no order into duration.
• There is no separate editing screen to find; everything happens on the overview.