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 |
| ⌘U / ⌘⇧X | Underline, strikethrough |
| ⌘⌥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 |
| ⌥1–6 | Outline, contents, history, typography, accessibility, settings |
| ⌥B | Research boards |
A blank line between paragraphs is a scene break and is kept as one. A run of blank lines is spacing and is not.
Spelling, and this book’s dictionary
Words the system checker does not recognise get a wavy underline. Right-click one and the first thing offered is Add to this book’s dictionary — after that it is a word here, and only here.
Per book, not per machine. The operating system’s own “Learn Spelling” writes to your account, so a place-name invented for one novel would follow you into your mail and your calendar. A dictionary belongs to the work.
The list is a plain file beside the project, spelling.json. It is not hashed and
not part of any checkpoint: teaching a dictionary is not editing a draft, so nothing about the
document’s identity changes and no new state is written. Restore a draft from a year ago and
you keep today’s dictionary, which is the right way round — a dictionary is a fact about
the writer, not about the draft.
Only the paragraphs on screen are checked, so expect a beat after scrolling somewhere new. Spelling is macOS-only for now; on other platforms the application says so rather than showing a clean page and letting you assume.
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 an anchor button beside each recorded state in the history panel, and it is deliberately separate from checkpointing: it cannot be undone and it is permanent in public. The application asks before it does anything, because this is the one act here that publishes something. What leaves the machine is a fingerprint and a time — never the writing.
Offered on manuscripts only. Anchoring the whole state would mean disclosing every other tab later to substantiate the proof, so the expensive choice is not offered at all.
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.
Collecting that confirmation happens by itself. A proof written here carries the calendars’ commitment, and Strata goes back for the Bitcoin attestation the next time it starts — on launch rather than on a timer, because almost nobody leaves a writing application open for the hour a calendar needs. It asks nothing of you because it discloses nothing: it is asking an operator whether it has finished with a digest it already holds.
It collects for the project you have open. A proof in a project you have not opened lately waits, and one still unredeemed after a week says so.
Boards
A board is somewhere to put research: cards on a page, arranged however you find useful. They are listed under Contents with your manuscripts and material, in their own group — because unlike those, a board rides in no checkpoint and nothing on it is hashed. Moving a card cannot change what a document is.
Have as many as you like. A costume board, a food board, a board for one chapter: none of them is a level in a hierarchy, and a card can sit on several at once without being copied. Take it off one and it stays on the others and in the pile; only Delete card removes it for good, and that asks first.
A card is made of blocks — text, a list, a picture, a gallery — and that is all there is. New card offers starters like Recipe or Playlist, which simply lay out those blocks for you; after that it is an ordinary card and nothing remembers which starter it came from. Blocks can be added above or below any other, reordered, or removed.
Drop a picture anywhere. Onto a card it joins that card, onto a gallery it joins the set, onto empty space it becomes a new card where it landed. Pasting does the same. Nothing asks you to describe it first — a description is added on the card afterwards, where an undescribed picture says so.
| Shortcut | Does |
|---|---|
| ⌥B | Open and close boards |
| Enter / Esc | Start typing in a card, and stop |
| Space | Pick a card up, and put it down |
| Arrows | Move between cards, or move the one you are holding |
| ⇧+arrows | Resize a card |
| Esc while holding | Put the whole board back as it was |
| ⇧F10 | Menu for the card, or for the block you are typing in |
A long press picks a card up with the mouse or a finger, which is what tells a drag from a scroll. Escape with nothing held closes the board.
Two shortcuts in the text itself. A web address becomes a link on its own, and
[the name you want](https://…) becomes a link with that name. In a list, words
before an address become its name: Durme durme https://…. Nothing else is
interpreted — what is stored is exactly what you typed, so a card stays readable
without this software.
What is not built yet
Citations, footnotes, tables and links are not in the manuscript format yet, so they cannot survive a save there — cards are a different matter, and links on a board are kept, because nothing on a board goes through that format. 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.