The Library

Library is the first row in the left sidebar, under Home. It is the page to open after a week away: not a document, but the whole project at a glance.

Nothing here needs setting up. Every number is something Scriptorium was already recording as you wrote.

Vital signs

A row of tiles across the top.

Manuscript	words in the book
Wiki	words in your notes and entities
This week	what you have actually added in the last seven days
Retention	how much of what you wrote is still in the document
Per active hour	typed words per hour of real writing time

The two word totals are never added together, here or anywhere else in Scriptorium. Two hundred thousand words of worldbuilding and twenty thousand of manuscript is not a two-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word book, and a page that said so would be lying to you about the only number that matters. See Writing Goals & Sessions for why the two surfaces are kept apart throughout.

Under the tiles, a thin bar shows where the words came from — typed, dictated, pasted, AI. It is a plain stacked bar and nothing more: a distribution, not a verdict.

“since ⟨date⟩”

Several tiles carry a small date. Retention, the hourly rate and the provenance bar are observations of how you write, and Scriptorium only began recording them in a particular release — there is nothing in an older project to reconstruct them from. The date says when the record starts, so a five-year-old book’s first weeks are never presented as its whole history.

Activity

A year of writing, one square per day, with a Manuscript / Wiki / Both switch and a year selector.

The switch changes what is measured, not the colour scheme. In Manuscript or Wiki, a darker square means more words on that surface. In Both, the square stops being a word count at all and simply says you worked that day — the tooltip still names the two figures separately. A day spent building the wiki is a real working day, and showing it blank would be as misleading as adding the two together.

A day where you churned a lot of words and kept almost none gets a ring rather than reading as empty. Rewriting is work.

Below the calendar, when there is data for it, an hours you write histogram — your own clock, not a UTC one. It stays hidden until there is something in it.

Sections

One bar per section that holds prose, in the order they appear in the book. Height is length; colour is how much you have revised it. Click a bar to open that section.

Three colours, and the third is the important one:

• Pale — no revision recorded. You wrote it and left it.
• Solid — heavily revised.
• Hatched — not measured. This section’s history predates revision tracking, so Scriptorium genuinely does not know.

The caption says the date measurement starts from. An old chapter is never drawn as a pristine one.

Goals & pace

Your goals, with a sentence above them the goal cards do not say: how many words a day the target needs, what you are actually averaging, and — for a total-words goal — the date you finish at your current pace, with your days off honoured.

The average is per writing day, not per calendar day. If you write hard three days a week, you are not producing a seventh of that daily, and the projection should not pretend you are.

Census & thin spots

What the project holds — counts by type and by entity template — and then the gaps, each one clickable:

• Mentioned but never linked — a character the manuscript talks about with no page link to their entry. Alongside the entry’s own title, Scriptorium looks for short forms taken from it: the name without a leading article (The Amnesty → Amnesty) and each capitalised word (Peregrine Ash → Peregrine, Ash). A character introduced once in full and called by their first name for the rest of the book is found that way, and the row says which form matched — as “Rosalind” — so you can see why it is listed.

  Short forms are a guess, so they are checked before they count. A form two entries would both answer to is dropped, because it identifies neither. A form that only ever appears at the start of a sentence is dropped too — that is how Ash the substance behaves and not how a character’s name does. And occurrences inside the full name are never counted twice.

  What no amount of guessing reaches is an entry written about in words it does not contain — the detective, her brother. For those, open the entry and click See mentions, beside its type. That opens the Mentions panel on the right sidebar, which has two halves.

  At the top, Also known as: a box for the other names the book uses, separated by commas — Rosalind, Ros, the Inspector. Declared names are matched exactly as the title is, and they are not guesses, so none of the checks above apply to them: if you say the book calls her the Inspector, every the Inspector counts.

  Below it, Mentioned in lists every chapter and scene that names the entry, in reading order, with a count each — so it says not just how often a character appears but where they enter the book and where they drop out of it. Under the list is what actually matched, with a derived short form marked (guessed), since that is the only kind of match here that is not something you said. Together they are the fastest way to tell an alias that works from one with a typo in it: type the name, and the list either fills in or does not.

  The panel is for entities. A note does not get it, because a note is not something the manuscript forgot to mention.

• Never mentioned in the manuscript — an entry the book has not used yet.

• Thin documents — entries that are near empty. An entry counts as thin only when it is short on both prose and filled properties: a character sheet with forty completed fields and no description is a finished character sheet, not a gap.

• Short sections, and unresolved annotations — with the ones whose passage has been deleted counted separately.

Continue

The documents you last worked on, newest first, with today’s word delta. The first one carries the last sentence you wrote, set in your manuscript’s own typeface — so picking the book back up starts from the line you left rather than from a file name.