Using Strata
Bringing a manuscript in, writing, marking states, and getting work back out.
Most of this works the way a word processor works, and where it does, this page says nothing. What it covers is the part that is genuinely different: the record, and the three separate things people mean by “save”.
Start with what you have
Drop a .docx onto the importer, or use Add files. A Google Docs export
with several tabs arrives as several tabs; a plain document arrives as one.
Import brings across more than the words: headings, emphasis, scene breaks, page breaks, lists, figures with their descriptions, and any comments the file carried — with the paragraph each was left on. Embedded fonts are noticed but not yet kept.
You are then asked which tabs are manuscripts and which are material. It matters: a manuscript carries its own chain and can be cut as a draft, while material travels with the project and never is. Notes, outlines and character sheets are material.
The editor
Select any words and a small bar appears above them: bold, italic, heading level, bullet list, numbered list, and comment. The heading control opens all six levels plus body text, so a demoted heading can be restored to the level it was.
| Shortcut | Does |
|---|---|
| ⌘B / ⌘I | Bold, italic |
| ⌘⌥1–6 | Heading level |
| ⌘⌥0 | Back to body text |
| ⌘⇧8 / ⌘⇧7 | Bullet list, numbered list |
| Tab / ⇧Tab | Nest and un-nest a list item |
| ⌘F / ⌘⇧H | Find, find and replace |
| ⌘P | Switch document |
| ⌥1–5 | Outline, contents, history, typography, accessibility |
A blank line between paragraphs is a scene break and is kept as one. A run of blank lines is spacing and is not.
Notes on a draft
Select the words a note is about and press Comment. Notes imported from a
.docx arrive already attached to the words their author selected.
The pane appears once a draft has notes on it. Clicking one takes you to it; you can reply, and you can resolve — which hides it without deleting it, because what an editor asked for and what you did about it is the record of a pass.
Notes are anchored to the content of a paragraph rather than its position, so writing above them does not shuffle them. If the paragraph a note was left on is gone entirely, the note says so and stays at the top of the pane rather than attaching itself to whatever now occupies that line.
Saving, checkpointing, cutting
| Act | What it is |
|---|---|
| Saving | Bookkeeping. Happens on its own, twenty seconds after you stop typing. Covers every tab, so “where was I on Tuesday” has an answer. Asserts nothing. |
| Checkpoint ⌘S | A provenance act about one manuscript. Commits to that manuscript’s text and to the previous entry in its chain. This is what can be witnessed. |
| Cut a draft | Declaring a state complete and naming it. “Second draft”, “what I sent my agent”. |
The history panel compares any two states, and will compare one against the text on screen without saving it first. It opens on what changed by chapter — retitled, revised, moved, untouched — and shows the words only for the chapter you open. A chapter that was renamed says what it used to be called, rather than reading as one chapter deleted and another written. Comparing reads two states and writes nothing.
A chain belongs to one work. Checkpointing a novel says nothing about the notes filed beside it, and a single entry covering three manuscripts would be a claim about none of them — a reader checking book one would be handed a number that moves whenever book three is touched.
Export
Any tab exports — a synopsis or a query letter is a document you send to a stranger too, and export never cared that a chain belongs to a manuscript.
| Format | Notes |
|---|---|
| Typeset. The only format that embeds its fonts, so it sets identically anywhere. | |
| DOCX | What an agent or a journal will ask for. Round-trips back into Strata losslessly. |
| EPUB | Valid EPUB 3 with a real navigation document. |
| HTML | One self-contained file — stylesheet and images travel inside it. |
| LaTeX | Source, for a journal or a typesetter. Their class decides how it sets, which is the point of handing someone LaTeX rather than a PDF. |
Every format is offered for a whole document and for a selection of sections, from the same list. A DOCX or an EPUB names a font and carries none, so if a passage is set in a face the reader is unlikely to have — a Ladino passage in a Sephardic hand, say — export says so rather than letting it arrive as something else.
Undescribed figures are reported at export rather than passed over: a reader who cannot see an image is told nothing about it, and only you can write the sentence that fixes that.
Anchoring a state
A checkpoint is evidence to you. Anchoring makes it evidence to anyone: the hash — never the text — is committed to the Bitcoin blockchain through OpenTimestamps, so the state can be shown to have existed no later than that moment.
It is currently a command-line step, and deliberately separate from checkpointing: it cannot be undone and it is permanent in public. It reveals nothing about the writing, because what leaves the machine is a hash.
strata anchor <project> <checkpoint>Confirmation follows in about an hour. Until then you hold a promise from the calendar operators rather than an anchor in the chain, and the app says so rather than rounding up.
What is not built yet
Citations, footnotes, tables and links are not in the format yet, so they cannot survive a save. Strikethrough and underline are not either. Embedded fonts are detected on import and discarded — export warns when a passage needs a face the reader is unlikely to have, but only the PDF can carry one. A typeface covering part of a paragraph is recorded and not yet applied, and export says so. Anchoring and verifying someone else’s record are command-line only. The application is not signed yet, so a first open will warn. There is no sync and no mobile app.
Everything above is on the overview with its current state, and that table is kept true on purpose — a status page that flatters the software is worse than none.