Korean and Japanese Typing That Finally Works on Desktop, a Real First-Line Indent, and Lore Mentions You Can Trust -- Plotiar Product Updates (August 2026)

A writer in Seoul sent in a bug report a few weeks back that read almost like a riddle. Type an English word into the manuscript and it appeared normally. Switch the keyboard to Korean and type a syllable, and nothing happened at all -- not garbled, not delayed, just silence, as if the editor had stopped listening the moment the language changed. A reload fixed it, for a while. Then it broke again, right after she started writing.

That bug, and several like it, traced back to the same handful of decisions about what a keystroke means before it ever reaches the page. This stretch went after that layer specifically for anyone writing in Korean, Japanese, or Chinese, alongside a separate pass on the parts of the app that had been quietly dropping a last edit when you clicked away too fast. Here is what changed.

Typing in Korean, Japanese, or Chinese Actually Works

The core problem was exactly what it looked like from the outside. On desktop, the editor only accepted keystrokes that map directly to a single character, which is how English and most Latin-script typing works but is not how Korean, Japanese, or Chinese input methods build a word -- they compose a character over several keystrokes before committing it. Every one of those keystrokes was silently dropped, which is why a reload seemed to "fix" things: it reset a flag that phone typing never tripped in the first place. Desktop now handles composed input the same way mobile already did, for every script.

Two smaller bugs shared the same root. Font and formatting choices picked from the toolbar used to get dropped mid-word for anyone composing in one of these scripts, quietly falling back to the document's default font instead. And pressing Enter while composing inserted a blank space rather than starting a new paragraph, with hardware Shift+Enter and Ctrl+Enter -- for a soft line break or a page break -- unreachable the entire time. Both now behave the way Enter is supposed to, no matter what language is being typed.

Line breaking for Korean text follows the actual rules now, too. The short standalone syllables Korean writers use constantly, the rough equivalent of "haha," used to be treated as one unbreakable word, so a line could end nearly 80 percent blank rather than wrap in the middle of a run of them. And a line could no longer start with a closing quotation mark or end with an opening one, which Korean and Japanese typesetting conventions do not allow.

Every Corner of the App Now Speaks Korean

Korean translation coverage is complete. AI Studio and the subscription and credit messaging had been sitting in English for every Korean-speaking user; both now match the rest of the app. Separately, the right-click and long-press menu -- Cut, Copy, Paste, Select all -- was hardcoded in English for all seven non-English languages, even though full translations for it had already shipped and simply were not wired up. It is wired up now, in all eight supported languages.

A First-Line Indent That Is an Actual Setting

First-line paragraph indent has existed as a document style option for a while, and every export format already respected it. It just never did anything on the page itself, so the only way to get an indented first line was to type a tab -- which is a character, and travels with the text everywhere you do not want it to. The setting now genuinely indents the first line, adjustable in inches from the toolbar. Paragraph formatting more broadly -- indent, alignment, line spacing -- also now survives copy and paste to and from Word and Google Docs in both directions, instead of landing flat.

A Character Count, in a Unit That Means Something

The status bar offered a word count and nothing else, which is close to useless if length is measured in characters rather than space-separated words, the way Korean publishing measures a manuscript. There is a character count now, counted precisely rather than inflated the way a naive count can be for Korean or accented text. Reading time got the same fix: it used to apply an English words-per-minute formula to every language, overestimating Korean by roughly three times, and now switches to characters-per-minute automatically based on what is actually being written.

Exported PDFs and EPUBs Keep Your Font

This one turned out to be bigger than it looked. PDF export was supposed to wait until the chosen fonts had finished loading before generating the file, but a timing bug meant that wait resolved instantly, before the fonts had even started loading -- so every PDF export, for every user, silently fell back to a generic font instead of whichever one had actually been chosen. It now waits properly. And for Korean, Japanese, and Chinese manuscripts specifically, plain PDF and EPUB exports had no fallback font at all for those scripts, so a Hangul or Han-character manuscript could render as empty boxes. There is a proper fallback now, so that cannot happen.

Lore Mentions You Can Actually Trust

Several accuracy bugs in mention counting are fixed. An entry whose only alias was a lone punctuation mark, a stray period for instance, was matching against every period in an entire manuscript -- in one case counting well over a hundred mentions of an entry nobody had actually written about. Deleting every occurrence of a name from a chapter used to leave the old, higher count sitting there indefinitely, because nothing ever rescanned downward. And an entry with a full name and a shared alias, "Elena" aliased from "Elena Vasquez," used to count one real mention as two. All three are fixed, and counts now move both up and down as a document is actually edited.

Lore search is fixed too. Searching by an alias or a tag returned nothing at all, for anyone -- only a search by an entry's exact title ever worked. If lore entries lean on aliases and tags to stay organized, search now actually finds them.

A few smaller fixes round out the stretch. The taskboard, family tree, and plot grid now save whatever was mid-edit before letting you navigate away, instead of silently discarding it on a quick in-app route change; the map view now honestly reports a failed save instead of showing "Saved" regardless. Coming back to a plot grid or family tree page after stepping away no longer shows a stale, pre-edit version of what was just saved. Creating a new template now shows up in the sidebar immediately, without a refresh. Select all is one tap away on mobile again instead of buried in a submenu. And reconnecting after a dropped connection now shows a collaborator's real name and cursor color right away, instead of a moment of "Anonymous" with a gray cursor.

The writer in Seoul wrote back a few days after the fix shipped. No bug report this time -- just a few sentences, in Korean, about a chapter she had finished.

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