The Tools menu

The wrench icon in the editor toolbar, top to bottom. Analysis and import/export already have their own pages — this one covers the rest, including three commands that reset the Story Bible and are easy to mix up.

Formatting

Prose Formatting…

Opens the style editor — fonts, sizes, line spacing, margins and colour for both body text and headings, with a live preview beside the controls. This is what the manuscript preview and PDF/EPUB exports actually use; nothing here touches your prose, only how it is typeset.

A Presets menu holds "Standard Manuscript Format" plus any you save yourself, and an Import Style menu can pull a look from elsewhere: a Vellum EPUB, a .ulstyle file from Ulysses, or a book.json folder. Every import lands as a new named preset rather than overwriting your current style, so trying one out costs nothing.

AI Analysis

Analyze Manuscript with AI…, the two re-analyze commands, and Propose Scene Splits… have their own page — see Reading the manuscript with AI. The Engine: line beneath them is not a command; it names whichever of Claude or on-device Apple Intelligence is about to do the reading.

Story Bible

Scan Manuscripts for Entity Links

A retroactive sweep, not a preview. It reads every chapter and scene in the active manuscript (or, when a project has more than one, an additional Scan All Manuscripts for Entity Links covers every book at once) for plain-text mentions of names already in the Story Bible, and rewrites each free-standing one into a real link — the same link the wikilink autocomplete would have made if you had typed it. A summary reports how many mentions were linked.

Look Up Wikipedia References

The bulk sibling of the "Import from Wikipedia" option on a single record. This one walks every character, location, event, object and organization in the project that does not already have a reference and searches for each in turn. An exact-title match is linked automatically; a genuinely ambiguous search is left for you, and the summary afterward tells you how many need a decision — open each in its own inspector to choose among the candidates.

Continuity Check…

Reads the whole project for ten kinds of inconsistency: plot items set up but never paid off (and the reverse), a character appearing in a scene before the event where they should have learned something, participation in an event dated outside a character's own lifespan, a character double-booked in two overlapping events, physically impossible travel between two dated locations, conflicting birth or death dates, a stub entity linked from the manuscript but never filled in, and prose describing a character's eyes or hair in a colour that contradicts their record.

The sheet this command opens shows the timeline-related conflicts — dates, double-booking, travel, foreknowledge — alongside every date on file, sorted chronologically. The other kinds it finds (unresolved setups, stub entities) surface instead on the entity's own record, in its Continuity section, where each issue can be marked Resolve or Ignore. Re-running the check does not raise an issue twice — an ignored one stays ignored until the thing that caused it changes.

Statistics…

One dashboard, read-only, scoped by the menu at the top — All Manuscripts by default, or check off just the ones you want the numbers to cover. Everything below it follows that scope: total entities, connections and tags; word count written against target, with an Earned Value Analysis underneath it for anyone who wants to track a manuscript the way a project schedule would — a Schedule Index comparing how much of the book is actually finished against how much word-count credit that should represent, and a Writing Index comparing words written to words earned, so a chapter that's technically "on target" by word count but still mostly drafted rather than revised doesn't read as further along than it is.

Below that: every chapter's word count against its own target, scenes grouped by status, each story arc's completion percentage, a count of unresolved continuity issues by severity, upcoming Writing Reminders if you've created any, and a full breakdown of every record type in the project. Nothing here is editable — it's a single place to see the shape of the whole project at a glance, without opening each tool that tracks a piece of it separately.

An AI-Assisted Content section, when the scoped manuscript(s) have any AI marks at all, shows the same figures the AI Provenance Report is built from — total words carrying a mark, as a percentage, broken down by where each one came from — live, without exporting anything. See Writing aids in the editor for how a passage gets marked in the first place, and for the exportable report that lists the marked passages themselves rather than just totalling them.

Research Highlights…

Browses whatever's been read into the project from your Apple Books library via the Highlights app — see Research Highlights for the full path in, browsing, and inserting a quote into the manuscript or a note.

Import / Export

The five commands here — importing from Scrivener, EPUB, Plottr and a bibliography file, and exporting back to Scrivener — are covered in full at Importing and exporting, alongside the Export menu's own PDF, DOCX, RTF and EPUB commands.

Import Highlights (Apple Books)… is the sixth, covered separately at Research Highlights instead — it reads from the Highlights app's own backup file rather than a document you pick each time.

Anonymization

Apply Pseudonyms to Prose… and Restore Real Names in Prose… work from the mapping kept in the Name Registry — see The analysis tools for how the registry itself is built and edited.

Works & Data

Manage Works (add / delete)…

The general-purpose list for every manuscript in the project — rename in place, drag to reorder, add a new one, and delete. The binder toolbar's New Manuscript button is the fast path for starting one; this sheet is where you go to rename several, reorder the list, or remove one. Deleting here uses the exact same cascade as deleting a manuscript from its own context menu in the binder — see The binder — chapters and scenes exclusive to that manuscript go with it, and anything shared with another manuscript is kept and simply un-scoped.

Show Automatic Backups…

Opens the backups folder in the Finder — this command does not restore anything itself. A full project backup is written automatically immediately before every bulk rewrite or deletion in the app, the most recent twenty are kept, and File ▸ Import Project Backup… is where you actually restore one. There is no separate timed or autosave-driven backup; every one in that folder was taken right before something specific was about to change.

Compact Document…

Two housekeeping passes in one command. First, old automatic snapshots of your prose — the copies the app keeps of what a section looked like before each bulk rewrite — are trimmed to the five most recent per chapter or scene; anything you saved as a snapshot yourself is never touched. Second, the document's own database file is checkpointed and truncated at the disk level, which is where the size on disk actually shrinks. Safe to run at any time, document open or not — the worst case is that nothing was reclaimable and the command says so.

The three Story Bible reset commands

These look similar and are not. Read the scope column before choosing — none of these is undoable from the Edit menu, though a backup is written automatically first in every case.

A fourth, narrower command — Remove Empty Manuscript(s)… — only appears when the project actually has one: a work with no chapters or scenes at all, left over from an import or an abandoned start.

Examples

Reload Demo Story Bible… and Load Memoir Bible — Two Works (Example)… replace the current project's content with a sample one, for trying the app out or seeing a feature in a filled-in project rather than an empty one. Both write an automatic backup first, the same as every other command on this page that changes existing data.