Chapter 27 · The Project
Aliases, Custom Fields, and Hover Cards
An entry that carries only a name tells Storskarvia one thing: this word matters. Aliases tell it which other words mean the same person, and Details give it values it can hold your draft to. This chapter is about the three fields that decide how much work an entry actually does, and about the dotted underline they produce in your pages.
What gets underlined
Open a document and names Storskarvia recognises carry a dotted blue underline. The cursor turns into a question mark over them. The rules behind it explain almost every case of a name that will not light up.
- The Name and every alias count. Nothing else does. A surname you never entered is invisible, however often the draft uses it.
- Case is ignored. A screenplay cue in capitals and the same name in a line of action both match the one entry.
- Two characters minimum. A single-letter name or alias is never matched.
- It has to stand as a whole word. The characters on either side must be something other than a plain letter or digit. Ash matches in "Ash turned" and in "Ash's coat", because an apostrophe is a break. It does not match inside Ashley.
- Longest wins. When two terms overlap, the longer one claims the text and the shorter never appears underneath it. An entry named Anne-Marie beats an alias Anne on the same words.
- Every format. The same underline appears in a novel paragraph, a scene heading, a character cue, a stage direction, and an audio drama script.
Matching is literal on the characters themselves. Jose and José are two different terms, and one will not find the other. If your draft is inconsistent about an accent, enter both spellings.
Writing aliases that work
The Also known as (comma-separated) field takes up to eight alternatives. Separate them with commas and Storskarvia trims the spaces. Worth putting in:
- The nickname another character uses out loud.
- The surname on its own, when scenes use it without the first name.
- A title with the name attached: Inspector Vale, Mrs. Dalloway.
- The spelling you keep getting wrong, so the continuity editor can tell you that you did.
Be careful with an alias that is also an ordinary word. Add Rose and every rose in the book is underlined and treated as that character. The same goes for Doc, May and Pike. An alias that is ambiguous on most pages costs more than it earns.
Aliases matter most on entries created for you. ⟳ Sync from script reads cues and sluglines and files each one under its name alone, title-cased from the capitals in your script, so MCDONALD arrives as Mcdonald and no nickname comes with it. Fixing the name and adding the aliases afterwards is the step that turns a synced list into something the staff can use. Chapter 26 covers both automatic paths in full.
They also settle what the continuity editor calls somebody. Once entries exist it runs grounded, and every alias resolves back to the canonical Name, so a claim made about Danny and a claim made about Daniel are compared against each other rather than filed apart. A claim about a name Storskarvia cannot resolve to any entry is dropped in grounded mode. That is the real cost of a missing alias: silence, rather than a wrong answer.
Details a check can use
Details are label and value pairs you define. Press + Add detail for a row, fill in both boxes, and remove a row with the × beside it. The placeholders show the shape the feature was built for: Eye colour and Green.
Each completed Detail becomes a claim in its own right during a continuity check, sitting
alongside the claims pulled out of your manuscript. When the two disagree, the finding quotes your
entry as one side of the argument, in the form
(story bible: Elena — Eye colour: green), against the sentence in your pages that says
otherwise.
Labels are matched loosely, so you do not have to remember your own phrasing. Storskarvia lowercases a label, drops colour, color, the, a, an, of and possessives, and trims a plural. Eye colour, Eyes and eye color all land on the same attribute, and so do Hair colour and Her hair.
| Good detail | Poor detail | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Eye colour: grey | Appearance: striking | One fixed value against a judgement nothing can contradict. |
| Age in 1974: 31 | Age: older now | A number can conflict with a number. |
| Car: red Volvo estate | Drives a lot | An object that has to stay the same object. |
| Scar: left eyebrow | Backstory: complicated | Prose belongs in the Summary. |
A row with a label and no value is kept on the entry and contributes nothing to a check, because seeding needs both halves. A row with a blank label is dropped when you save, so an empty row you added and abandoned costs nothing. A Detail about a temporary state is wasted: the continuity editor discards mood, weather and what somebody wore in one scene by design.
The hover card
Hover an underlined name and a card appears with the entry's type, its name, its summary, and its Details as a labelled list. Nothing on it can be edited from there.
The card opens below the name when there is room and above it when there is not, and it is held inside the window rather than running off the right-hand edge. On a phone or tablet, tapping an underlined name pins the card open and tapping anywhere else puts it away, so the underline is not a promise a touchscreen cannot keep.
The Story Bible tab in the right-hand rail lists every entry by type. Clicking one selects the first occurrence of that entry's Name in the document. It does not look for aliases, so an entry whose full name never appears in this document has nothing to jump to and clicking it does nothing visible.
The caps
Everything here has a ceiling, applied when you save.
| Field | Limit |
|---|---|
| Name | 200 characters, and required |
| Also known as | 8 aliases, each 80 characters |
| Summary | 4,000 characters |
| Details | 30 rows, labels 60 characters, values 400 characters |
Going over a cap is quiet. A ninth alias is dropped and a thirty-first Detail is dropped, with no warning and no error. Reopen the entry after saving a long list and count what came back.
When it does not behave
A name you definitely entered is not underlined. Check the apostrophe first.
The editor turns a typed ' into a curly ’ as you write, and the story bible
dialog is an ordinary text box that keeps the straight one, so O'Brien in the entry and
O’Brien in the draft are two different words. Copy the name out of the manuscript and
paste it in as an alias. After that, check the two-character minimum and the whole-word rule
above.
An edit on the story bible page has not reached the editor. The editor loads the story bible once, when the document opens, and refreshes it only when you use + Add from selection. New aliases, new Details and deleted entries all arrive when you reload the editor tab.
No underlines at all in a draft somebody shared with you. The story bible belongs to the project and a share covers one document, so a collaborator is sent no entries, sees an empty Story Bible tab, and gets no underlines or hover cards. Nothing is broken. Chapter 18 and Part VII cover what a collaborator does see.
The wrong entry claims a word. When two entries share an alias, one of them claims every occurrence and the other never underlines there. Give one of them a longer alias, or drop the shared one.
An alias survives a rename. Renaming a character in your pages changes nothing here. Update the Name, move the old spelling into the aliases if the earlier chapters still use it, and the continuity editor will keep treating both as one person instead of comparing your draft to somebody who no longer exists.
Part VI is where the staff themselves are covered: what a continuity check costs, how a finding is laid out, and why some findings are held back. This chapter is only the half of it you control.
Updated 2026-09-03 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?