Timeline View

The timeline lays your story out against story time, counted in a unit you choose in Book Settings — months for the example book, days or years for yours. 0 is the beginning of the book; negative values are backstory.

Open the timeline from Views in the sidebar and it appears as a tab in the editor — put it in a split and you can write with the shape of the book underneath you.

What you're seeing

• Container bands across the top — parts with their derived progress (2/4 final), spanning the time their chapters cover.
• Type rows — each kind of thing with a place in time gets a row; cards show the progress ring, the time label, and the POV character. Cards that overlap in time stack.
• Named rows — a kind can have its own row (the example book's notes share a World Events row), and any single entity can be moved to a row of its own from the inspector — so different strands of world history read as separate strips.
• Journey lanes at the bottom — one lane per character (or item), marking where along the axis they appear. See Journeys.

The example book's Kuno's ascent sits at month −12 — backstory, visible at a glance to the left of 0.

The glance panel

Clicking any timeline item — a card, a band, or a journey marker — shows it in the panel on the right: status, story time, POV, and the full text with every link readable. You can skim a chapter without leaving the timeline; the Open button jumps to it in the editor when you want to write. The panel is the same inspector you know from the editor — the toolbar's sidebar button and ⌘4 show and hide it.

Story order vs. manuscript order

The toggle at the top switches the horizontal arrangement:

• Story Order — position by story time (the picture above).
• Manuscript Order — position by place in the book, which makes flashbacks and non-linear structure jump out: a chapter that sits late in the book but early in story time is a flashback, and here you can see it.

Cards can be dragged to reorder where the view allows it.

Giving something a place in time

Select the entity and fill in the inspector's Story Time section: From (required to appear on the timeline), an optional To for things that span time, a human-readable Label ("the last day"), and optionally a Row of its own. See the inspector.

Saving the timeline

The share button in the top-right corner writes the timeline to a PDF — every column, however far it scrolls off screen, on a single page in whichever order you're viewing. See Exporting.