An editor that already knows what you're writing.

Two shelves, one licence

The library sidebar gains a Books shelf beside Scripts. Same app, same subscription; folders, projects and covers work exactly as they do on the other shelf. Your screenplays are untouched — a book is a kind of document, not a different program.

A trade page, measured for real

Books sit on a 6×9″ sheet in Iowan Old Style with book margins, not screenplay ones. Slate measures the text with the same engine that draws it rather than assuming every character is the same width — so where a page ends is measured, not guessed at.

That fix landed under screenplays too, and corrected three long-standing page-count bugs on the way.

Chapters open on their own page

A chapter starts fresh, under its name. The three-level spine is the one you already know, renamed for prose: chapters hold sections, sections hold beats — the same structure a screenplay calls acts.

The board came with it

Beats, the beat board, and the storyboard all work on a book, in book vocabulary — chapters where a screenplay has acts. Planning a novel wants a board no less than planning a film does.

A Markdown twin beside every book

Each book keeps a readable .md file next to it — YAML front matter, ## chapter headings, real paragraphs — openable in any editor on earth. Screenplays keep their .fountain twin, as always.

Drafts and co-writing, unchanged

Everything in the two scenes below applies to a book exactly as it does to a script: drafts you branch and merge, proposed revisions from a co-writer or an editor, issues, and threaded comments in the margin.

Point it at a folder — that's the setup

Each script names its own shared folder, so different projects can have different collaborators. Publish drops a current copy there; your co-writer opens it in Slate and works on their own draft, on their own machine.

Proposed revisions, not surprises

Their pass comes back as a proposal with an author, a title, and a description. It arrives in your inbox with a toast and a pulsing badge; you review it line by line, comment in the margins, and merge — or decline, which is also an answer. Revised resubmissions thread onto the same conversation.

A return ticket for Final Draft people

Publish a .fountain and it carries a hidden return marker — if your co-writer edits it in Final Draft or a plain text editor and drops it back, it re-enters as a real reviewable proposal, not a mystery duplicate.

Reviewing is free. Forever.

A collaborator without a license can still read scripts and review, comment on, and merge incoming proposals at no cost. Your writing partner doesn't need to buy Slate to answer your notes.

Signed, tidied, de-duplicated

Work is signed with a name and initials so you can tell whose changes are whose. Processed bundles are filed away automatically and old ones cleaned up after 30 days — the shared folder stays a folder, not a junk drawer.