Help
Everything Skarvia does, in one page. ⌘F is your friend.
Want the long version? The Skarvia Manual covers all of this properly, chapter by chapter, with a search box and an index. This page is the summary.
Getting started
A project is your book, film, play, audio drama, episodic series, or video channel. Inside it live your documents (chapters, episodes, scripts), plus the project's Codex, Outline board, Research library, and Lookbook. The Studio groups projects by type, and each project opens as a binder: documents in your order, grouped into parts or seasons, with a shared world — a series keeps one Codex across every episode.
- Create a project from the Studio page. The type you pick decides which editor and formatting you get: novel, film / screenplay, stage play, audio drama / podcast, series (episodic), or video script. The type is fixed once the project exists, so pick it before you write.
- In the binder, use ↑ ↓ to reorder documents, ⇄ to move one into a part or season, and the "new part / folder" form to start a group. Your cloud folders mirror the structure.
- The first time you open the Studio and the editor, a short tour points out the essentials. Skip it any time; it won't come back.
- The first time you save a document, Skarvia asks where it should live — see Where your work lives. This isn't optional decoration; it's the whole storage model.
- Forgot your password? Reset it from the sign-in page; the link goes to the address you signed up with.
Full chapter: Your First Project and Your First Document · What Skarvia Is
The editor
Novels get a full word processor: fonts, styles, lists, alignment, images, tables, footnotes, page breaks — and your pages paginate like a book.
Screenplays work like Final Draft: Tab and Enter cycle
element types (action → character → dialogue…), typing INT. or EXT.
starts a scene heading, and the page count is live and Courier-true. Dual dialogue, character
rename, scene numbers, and a title page are in the Script tab.
Stage plays get standard modern play layout: centred character cues, italic stage directions, and act and scene structure.
Audio drama and scripted podcasts get a format built for the ear, with narration, character cues, and sound and music cues, and a runtime read from the spoken word.
Video scripts get a two-lane VO/visual format with a running-time estimate.
| Shortcut | Does |
|---|---|
| Tab / Enter | Cycle screenplay element types |
| ⌘1–⌘6 | Jump straight to an element type (screenplay) |
| ⌘B / ⌘I / ⌘U | Bold / italic / underline |
| ⌘F | Find & replace |
| ⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z | Undo / redo |
The View tab has focus mode, typewriter scrolling, dark mode, and daily word goals. The status bar tracks words, pages, and your session count.
Where your work lives
Full chapter: Storage, Autosave, and Versions
Your manuscript's home is your own storage, not ours. Every document needs a
destination: your Dropbox, your Google Drive, or a folder on your own computer. Skarvia writes
real files there as you work — title.skarvia.json (the full document) and
.txt (plain text you can open anywhere, forever) — and keeps only a working copy
on our side for checks and rendering.
- Autosave runs as you type; the chip in the status bar shows sync state.
- Versions checkpoint automatically every 10 minutes, plus named versions
whenever you want (Versions ▾). Cloud copies go to a
.versions/folder next to your document. Restoring always backs up the current text first. - Edited elsewhere? If the cloud copy changed since your last sync, Skarvia adopts it on open — and if you also had unsynced local edits, those are preserved as a conflict-backup version first. Nothing is silently lost.
- Zero retention (checkbox in the storage dialog, cloud providers only):
after every successful sync, Skarvia purges its working copy. Your cloud file becomes the
only copy at rest; we re-fetch transiently when you open the document or run a check.
Version history then lives only in your
.versions/folder. - "This computer" storage uses your browser's folder access (Chrome, Edge, or Brave) and
writes
title.skarvia.jsonand.txtinto a folder you pick. Versions you name yourself are copied to.versions/there. Automatic checkpoints and the per-chapter text files are written by the cloud sync only, so a local folder gets the whole document rather than a file per chapter. Full chapter.
Your staff (the AI)
Everything lives in the Review tab. One rule above all: Skarvia never writes a word for you. It reads, researches, checks, and remembers — the byline stays yours.
- Check Facts reads your document, extracts every checkable real-world claim, verifies each against retrieved evidence, and then a second reviewer — the Skeptic — tries to tear every finding apart before you see it. You get a punch list of problems with sources, or one quiet line: "No issues found." There is no praise channel. It cannot compliment you; it is structurally unable to.
- Continuity catches the draft contradicting itself: if Mara's eyes were green in chapter two and brown in chapter fourteen, this is what finds it. A Codex makes it sharper, because it can hold your entries as the canonical version, but it does not need one. On an empty Codex it works out the subjects itself, so a naked draft still gets checked.
- The Codex is your story bible — characters, locations, items, factions, with aliases and custom fields. Fill it by hand, sync it from a script's cues and sluglines (free), or let AI populate it from a draft. That last one is a metered AI action charged by the length of the document, so filling the Codex from a whole novel costs about what fact-checking it does. Codex names get hover cards in the editor.
- Research: highlight a passage, ask anything ("how does an arraignment actually work?"), get a cited answer filed into the project's Research library.
Fact-checks, continuity checks, and research questions all draw from the same monthly allowance — see Plans & fair use.
Working with others
From the editor's Share ▾ menu, mint an invite link and send it however you like. Whoever opens it signs in (or creates an account) and the link becomes theirs alone.
- Reviewer links are for editors and beta readers: they work in suggestion mode — every edit becomes a tracked change for you to accept or reject — and they can comment. They cannot change your actual text, settings, or title; the server enforces it.
- Editor links grant full editing.
- Collaborators' saves sync to your storage. Versions, storage settings, exports with revision marks, and the AI staff remain yours alone.
- Revoke any link from the same menu; access ends immediately.
Suggest mode (Review tab) works for you too — flip it on before editing a collaborator's pass. Insertions show underlined in the author's color, deletions struck through; the Changes rail lists every suggestion with accept/reject, and comments support threaded replies with a resolved section.
Import & export
In (the Import button inside a project, next to its documents):
Word (.docx), OpenDocument (.odt), RTF, plain text, Markdown, HTML,
PDF, Final Draft (.fdx), Fountain (.fountain, .spmd),
Movie Magic (.mmsw), and whole projects from Scrivener
(.scriv), Fade In (.fadein) and Celtx (.celtx).
A single document can be 4 MB; a project archive can be 64 MB, since a Scrivener project
carries its research folder too.
Out (Export ▾ in the editor):
- Typeset PDF — Courier-true screenplay pages with title page and proper (MORE)/(CONT'D) dialogue breaks, or manuscript-format novel pages.
- Watermarked draft PDF — your text, diagonally stamped ("DRAFT", a recipient's name, whatever you type).
- PDF with revision stars — pick any saved version; every paragraph changed
since gets a
*in the margin and the revision name in the header. - Word (.docx), OpenDocument (.odt), RTF, HTML, Final Draft (.fdx), Fountain, and plain text.
- Ebook (.epub), for novels.
Also in the Review tab: Table Read (cast a voice per character and listen to your pages; the button reads Read Aloud outside screenplays) and Insights (who talks, locations, INT/EXT balance, runtimes).
Lookbook
Each project's Lookbook turns Codex characters and locations into visual boards. Set a house style once, generate a portrait per entry, tighten the Codex fields, regenerate. Generation uses monthly image credits (see below); each click costs one credit and overwrites that entry's previous portrait. Portraits are visible only to you.
Plans & fair use
| Free | Pro | Studio | |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI checks / month | 20 | 1,000 | 5,000 |
| Image credits / month | 3 | 25 | 100 |
How checks are counted: one check covers up to 10,000 words. Longer documents count proportionally — a 25,000-word script is 3 checks, a full 100,000-word novel is 10. If a check wouldn't fit in your remaining allowance it simply doesn't run and costs you nothing; you're never charged for work that didn't happen. Allowances reset every 30 days, counted from your own start date rather than the first of the month. Fact-checks, continuity checks, research questions, and filling the Codex from a draft all share the same pool.
A founding seat sets your price rather than granting you a plan. Founders pay half of whichever plan they choose, for as long as they keep it. The account runs on the plan it holds, so a new founder is on Free limits until they pick one. See Pricing.
Privacy & your data
- Your documents live in your storage; Skarvia keeps a working copy for its checks — or none at rest, with zero retention on.
- Cloud connections use OAuth scoped as narrowly as each provider allows (Dropbox app folder; Google Drive only files Skarvia creates). Tokens are encrypted at rest.
- When you run a check, your document text is sent to our AI provider to be analyzed and is not used to train anything on our instruction.
- The full policy lives at Privacy; the short version is we'd rather hold less of your data, not more.
Contact
Once you are signed in, the ✎ Feedback button sits at the bottom right of every page and reaches us directly. Bug, idea, or stray thought, we read all of it.