Pin Your Story to a Corkboard — Plus Focus Modes, Ambient Sounds, and a Mobile Overhaul

The last update was about version control and layout. This one is about making the place where you write feel like yours. A corkboard for planning, focus modes that dim everything except the sentence you are working on, ambient soundscapes to set the mood, and a full mobile redesign. Plus about twenty smaller things that quietly make a real difference.

Pin Your Story to a Corkboard

If you have ever pinned index cards to a wall to plan a novel, you already know what this is. The corkboard is a new content type built for visual story planning, and it works the way the physical version always should have.

Each card has a title, a synopsis you can edit inline, and optional metadata: status stamps like Idea, Draft, Revision, or Final, labels for tracking POV characters or subplots, tags for flexible categorization, links to other documents in your project, and word count targets for each scene or chapter.

Three view modes let you work the way that suits your brain:

• Grid — the classic card layout with drag-and-drop reordering. Good for linear chapter planning.
• Freeform — place cards anywhere on a canvas. Good for when your story structure is not a straight line.
• Label Lanes — cards grouped into horizontal swim lanes by label. Think of it as a kanban board where each lane is a POV character, a subplot, or a timeline. You can see at a glance how different threads weave through your story.

Cards come in three sizes, can be filtered and searched by status, and support sorting by status, label, title, or manual order. And because everything in Plotiar is collaborative, corkboards sync in real time if you are working with a co-author.

Focus Modes That Actually Focus

Most distraction-free modes just hide the toolbar. Ours dim the prose itself.

Selection Focus highlights only the text you select and fades everything else. Good for line-editing a single paragraph without the rest of the chapter pulling your attention.

Dialogue Focus automatically detects every piece of quoted dialogue in your document and highlights it, dimming the surrounding narrative. If you want to read through just the conversation in a scene, to check pacing or make sure each character sounds distinct, this is how.

Linguistic Focus uses natural language processing to highlight specific parts of speech. Toggle on nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs, and everything else fades. It is a revision tool disguised as a highlighter. Too many adverbs? You will see it. Weak verbs propping up every sentence? Obvious at a glance. This is the kind of analysis that writing craft books tell you to do manually — now the editor does it for you.

All three modes have an intensity slider from barely dimmed to nearly invisible, and you can choose whether the dimming applies only to the document or to the entire application — sidebar, toolbar, everything. Your preferences persist between sessions.

Write to the Sound of Rain

Eight ambient soundscapes are now built into Plotiar: Rain, Fireplace, Forest, Ocean, Wind, White Noise, Coffee Shop, and Thunderstorm. Pick one, adjust the volume, and write.

Every sound is procedurally generated using your browser's audio engine — no files to download, no buffering, works offline. They are not loops that repeat every thirty seconds. They are continuously generated, which means the rain never sounds the same way twice.

Access them from the sidebar menu or settings. A floating mini-player on desktop lets you switch sounds or adjust volume without leaving your document. Your selection and volume persist across sessions.

Three Levels of Immersion

The status bar now has a split button that steps through three fullscreen modes:

• Fullscreen — standard browser fullscreen with all UI visible. More screen real estate, same tools.
• Clean View — hides the sidebar and side panel. Just the document, the toolbar, and nothing else competing for attention.
• Deep Focus — hides everything. No sidebar, no toolbar, no status bar. Just your words and a floating button to exit when you are done. Combine this with an ambient soundscape and a focus mode, and the outside world genuinely disappears.

Split a Document in Half. Merge Three Into One.

Split: right-click anywhere in a document and choose "Split Document Here." Everything before the cursor stays in the original. Everything after becomes a new document, right next to it in your project. When chapter twelve turns out to be two chapters, this is a ten-second fix instead of a copy-paste marathon.

Merge: right-click a document in the sidebar and choose "Merge Documents." Pick which documents to combine, drag them into order, name the result, and optionally insert dividers between sections. The source documents are removed after merging, so you do not end up with duplicates.

Both operations are atomic and work directly on the collaborative editing state, so there is no risk of data loss even if you are working with a co-author at the time.

Your Typography, Your Rules

Several updates this week put you in control of how your documents look.

Font Library: A collection of 65+ fonts is now available in Settings, organized by category — serif, sans-serif, display, script, and monospace. Choose which fonts appear in your editor's font picker. If you write fiction in Garamond and academic papers in Times New Roman, set up your toolbar to show exactly those options and nothing else. Google Fonts load on demand, so only the ones you use affect performance.

Page Sizes: Documents are no longer locked to A4. Choose from A4, A5, US Letter, US Legal, and A3 in the details panel. Exports honor your selection, and importing a Word document or PDF auto-detects the source page size.

Line Spacing and Character Spacing: Two new toolbar dropdowns for precise control over line height and letter spacing. Manuscript double-spacing, tight single-spacing for notes, wider tracking for display text — all available without leaving the editor.

Document Defaults: A new section in Settings lets you configure the default page size, font, font size, margins, line spacing, and character spacing for every new document you create. Existing documents stay exactly as they are.

Install Plotiar Like an App

Plotiar is now a Progressive Web App. On any device — desktop, tablet, phone — you can install it and run it from your home screen or dock, just like a native application. It gets its own window, its own icon, and it loads faster on repeat visits because the app shell is cached locally.

A smart install prompt detects your platform and walks you through the process. On Chrome and Edge, it is one click. On Safari, it gives you step-by-step instructions. Dismiss the prompt and it waits a week before asking again. When we ship updates, a notification lets you refresh to get the latest version.

Mobile That Actually Works

We rebuilt the mobile experience from scratch.

The old sticky header is gone. In its place: floating action buttons for the sidebar and panels, plus a thin inline bar showing the document name and collaborator avatars. This gives your writing the full height of your phone screen.

The document editor has a new bottom status bar showing save status, word count, and spellcheck toggle, plus a dedicated mobile toolbar for text formatting that is designed for touch instead of being a shrunken desktop toolbar.

The sidebar no longer has five overlapping action buttons. A single menu contains everything. The share drawer has been redesigned for small screens. The statistics page, project landing, and template cards all adapt properly to narrow viewports now. Checklist items no longer overflow the page edge. The editor reliably fills the viewport without the content jumping around.

If you tried Plotiar on your phone before and gave up, try it again.

For Every Language and Keyboard

Two fixes that matter a lot if you write in anything other than English.

Keyboard shortcuts now work on every layout. Previously, Ctrl+Z on a Hebrew keyboard sent Ctrl+Zayin instead of the undo command, because the editor was reading the character instead of the physical key. Shortcuts now use the physical key position, so Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+B, Ctrl+S, and every other shortcut work regardless of your active language.

Text selection is precise for all scripts. Clicking to place your cursor in Hebrew, Arabic, or CJK text used to land a few characters off because the measurement engine was rounding per character. We switched to a more accurate approach, and cursor placement is now exact for every script.

Everything Else

Ctrl+scroll wheel zooms the document in and out. Middle mouse button pans. If you use these in other creative tools, they now work here too.

Justify alignment had a bug that could crash the renderer and blank your content display. Fixed. (Your data was never at risk — the document itself was fine, only the display broke.)

Intermittent "Failed to fetch" errors now retry automatically with better feedback instead of showing a cryptic error message.

The sidebar color picker was delayed and sometimes reverted your selection due to a race condition. Colors now apply instantly.

We also did a thorough security and stability pass across the entire server: fixing edge cases in project permissions, content deletion cleanup, cache invalidation, and subscription handling. None of this is visible, but it is the kind of work that prevents the bugs you would have noticed eventually.

What Is Next

The corkboard is version one. We are already thinking about card-to-document linking that lets you generate a manuscript outline directly from your corkboard, and about templates that give you a pre-built corkboard structure for common story formats like three-act, Save the Cat, or the Hero's Journey.

Focus modes are going to get smarter — highlighting by sentence complexity, by readability score, by emotional tone. The ambient sounds will grow too, with mixable layers so you can combine rain and fireplace, or coffee shop and thunderstorm.

Everything in this post is live now. If something feels off, tell us. We read every piece of feedback, and it directly shapes what we build next.