What's new in Insanitomeium — features, improvements, and fixes.
A synopsis longer than 500 characters was quietly not being saved. It stayed in the box while you worked, then disappeared when you switched documents. Synopses of up to 2,000 characters now save properly.
Renaming, moving, reordering, labelling or changing the status of a document could also fail without a word. Now, if a change can’t be saved, a message names the document and says so. A synopsis that couldn’t be saved stays in its box so you can try again.
Two characters on the relationship map can now have more than one relationship at a time, such as rivals who are also falling in love. Each one gets its own coloured line between them, and clicking any line opens an editor with a tab for every relationship the pair shares.
Dragging between two characters who are already connected now adds a new relationship instead of quietly changing the first one, dragging onto empty space creates a new character, and a relationship can be removed from the editor. Promoting a dashed character to a real character sheet brings their relationships with it: the new sheet starts with a row for each character who mentioned them, already linked and tagged.
You can now export to RTF, a rich-text file that Pages, Word, TextEdit and LibreOffice all open with your bold, italics, underlines and highlights kept, so a scene or a whole manuscript moves into another app looking the way you wrote it.
It's the best way to get formatted writing into Pages on an iPad. Copy and paste can't carry formatting there, but an RTF file can. RTF files from the project archive download also keep emoji correctly now, where before they came out garbled.
Pages you share with beta readers now come in four reading palettes — Auto, Light, Dark and Tome — so nobody has to read your chapters on a glaring white page at midnight.
Auto follows the reader's own device, so a phone or computer already set to dark mode shows your pages dark without anyone touching anything. Readers can switch at the bottom of any page, and their choice stays with them from chapter to chapter — even through a password-protected link.
Sliding a finger across words to select them on a phone could open the binder instead, because a swipe from the left edge was also the gesture for opening it. That swipe is gone: the binder button at the top-left is now the only way to open the binder, and selecting text near the left margin works like anywhere else.
Closing the binder also used to jump the document back to its first line. It now stays exactly where you were reading or writing.
A note or a sentence typed in the seconds before you closed or reloaded the tab could go missing from the saved copy until you next opened that document on the same device. It now reaches the server on the way out, every time.
The same fix removes a rare false alarm: on a slow connection the Tome could tell you a document had been "changed somewhere else" when the only other writer was you, a moment earlier. That message now appears only when it is true.
Insanitomeium now has a listing on AlternativeTo, the site people turn to when they are hunting for a replacement for software like Scrivener. If the Tome has earned a place in your writing, a Like there is the single most useful thing you can do to help other writers find it: https://alternativeto.net/software/insanitomeium/about/
The listing was refreshed this week with new screenshots and a description that finally covers the plot board, outliner, setting sheets, relationship map and beta-reader share links. You can also tick the features you use and leave a review.
On a phone, choosing Rename from a document’s ⋮ menu sometimes took two tries — the first tap opened the name for editing and closed it again at once, unless the document was already the selected one. It now works on the first tap, every time.
The arrow at the bottom-right of the phone formatting bar is there to push the keyboard back down, but it also showed while no keyboard was up and did nothing there. It now appears only while the keyboard is open.
A scene can now carry as many labels as you like — a point-of-view label and a "needs edit" label and a subplot label, all at once. The binder shows one coloured dot per label, and index cards on the corkboard show them as colour bands across the top.
The first label you add is the document’s main one, and it is the colour the app leads with anywhere only one can show. Deleting a label from the palette simply drops it from every document; the next label steps up.
The new Outline view lays your manuscript out as a table — one row per chapter and scene, with its synopsis, point-of-view character, plot threads, status and word count side by side. Everything in it is editable in place, so you can rework the shape of a book without opening a single scene.
Chapters and folders fold up, and their word counts roll up with them, so you can see at a glance which act is thin. The Threads column is tied to your plot outlines: ticking a thread on a scene adds a beat for that scene to the plot, and unticking removes it. A filter at the top shows only the scenes on one thread.
On a phone the table becomes a stack of cards with the same fields.
The Plot board shows your plot outlines as a grid — one row per thread, one column per chapter — with each beat as a card. Drag a card into a chapter to place it there, and link it to the scene it is written in to have it follow that scene. It is the same beats as your plot outline, seen from above, so a change in either place shows in the other.
Each thread has a colour, and you can add a new subplot thread straight from the board. Beats you have not placed yet wait in an Unplaced column at the left.
On a phone the board shows one chapter at a time, with tabs to move between them.
Plot has joined characters and research as a planning sheet. A new plot outline starts with a premise — protagonist, want, need, antagonist, stakes, theme — and three empty acts ready for your beats. Choose a structure from the pill under the title — Three-act, Save the Cat, Hero's Journey, Five-act, Seven-point, Kishōtenketsu or Freytag — and the sheet offers to fill in that framework's beats for you, so you write what happens rather than remembering what comes next. Or leave it blank, or start free-form and write your plan as prose.
Every beat can be linked to the scene it is written in. The beat number shows the link, fills in once that scene has words, and a progress line at the top of the sheet tells you how many beats are drafted. Beats export with their numbers when you compile.
Places now get the same treatment as characters and research. A setting sheet starts with an at-a-glance block, then sections for sensory details, layout and landmarks, history, who is found there, the rules of the place, its role in the story, the scenes set there, and notes. Choose a type — building, room, city, region, wilderness, vehicle, realm and more — from the pill under the title.
Like every other sheet you can start from the template or from a blank page, add and remove sections, and it appears in search, quick-jump, the corkboard and compile like any other document.
If you have turned on "Don't count pasted text as progress", your Writing Pace graph, activity heatmap and yearly word total on your profile page now leave pasted words out as well. Until now the setting only affected your session and sprint counts, so a big paste could still show up as a day of heroic output you had not actually written.
Your streak is deliberately untouched. A day you pasted still counts as a day you showed up, so turning this on will never shorten a run of writing days you have already earned. Document and project word totals still include everything, as they always have.
On a phone you can reach the end of your document again. The formatting bar at the bottom of the screen had been sitting on top of the last few lines, so you could not scroll to them or tap to put the cursor there — the only way to keep writing was to leave a stack of blank lines underneath. The bar now stops where the text stops, and it gets out of the way when you hide it.
A note you were still typing into an annotation no longer disappears if you close the tab or reload the page before clicking away from it. Every other way of leaving a note already kept it; that one did not, and it came back with the note blank.
A character created as a blank page now stays a blank page. Drawing a relationship from it on the relationship map used to silently turn it into a character sheet — the form you had chosen not to use. The relationship is still recorded and still shows on the map, and your page is left exactly as it was.
Deleting from the binder is no longer permanent. Delete a document and a message appears at the bottom of the screen with an Undo button — one click and everything is exactly as it was. Miss it, and the document is not gone either: a new Trash section at the foot of the binder holds everything you have deleted for 30 days, and one button puts it back. Delete a folder and its whole contents come back with it, in the right places.
Deleting also stops and asks first now, and tells you how much is going. Delete a folder or a chapter and the prompt names it and counts what is inside, so a whole act cannot quietly disappear on one mis-tap. That matters most on a phone, where Delete sits directly beneath Share and Export in the same menu and your thumb only has to miss by a single line.
If you are clearing out a lot at once, the prompt gets tiresome quickly, so you can switch it off — look for "Confirm before deleting" on your profile page, or in the ··· menu if you would rather not leave what you are writing. The setting belongs to your account rather than to one device, so turning it off on your laptop turns it off on your phone too. The Trash is still there either way.
The binder is no longer a fixed width. Drag its right-hand edge and it grows with you, up to twice its old size — so "Chapter Eleven — The Long Road Home, Part Two" reads as itself instead of trailing off into a row of dots. Your chosen width is remembered on that device, and hiding and re-showing the binder brings it back exactly as you left it.
Titles that are still too long for the space now show in full when you hover over them, however wide the binder is and however deeply the document is nested.
Writing on a phone just got a proper toolbar. A single row of controls now sits directly above the on-screen keyboard, with bold, italic, underline, lists, quotes, undo and redo always within thumb reach — and a dedicated line-break button, which is the one thing a phone keyboard simply cannot do on its own. Tap Aa at the left for everything else: headings, alignment, tables, scene breaks, checklists and more, grouped and labelled.
A sweep across every screen on a phone turned up a handful of things worth fixing. The Compile, Share and feedback windows had a close button that sat underneath the camera notch on newer iPhones and could not be tapped at all — the only way out was to force-quit the app. That is gone. Find, Quick jump and Version history had no way in on a phone and now live in the formatting panel. The Tome theme had pale text on gold buttons that was hard to read, and turning your phone sideways no longer clips the top bar.
Two more, away from the phone. Dragging a folder above a scene in the binder now stays where you put it, instead of springing back below. And if you leave the same document open in two places — a laptop and a phone, say — the app now notices before one copy can quietly overwrite the other, and asks which one you want to keep.
Meet the Relationship Map: a new view that draws your whole cast as a living web. Every character becomes a card you can drag around, and the relationships you note on their sheets become colored lines between them — family, romance, ally, rival, enemy — with thicker lines for stronger bonds.
Relationships aren't always mutual, and the map knows it. If one character calls someone a friend but she considers him a rival, the line splits down the middle — each half colored by how that character sees it. You can build the web right on the map, too: drag the small + handle from one character onto another and both sheets get the relationship, with a quick picker to tag each side's view. People you mention but haven't given a sheet yet appear as dashed ghost cards, one click away from becoming real characters.
Character and research sheets also learned proper formatting along the way. Line breaks now survive exactly as you typed them, you can style text with bold, italic, underline and strikethrough, and a dash makes a real bullet list — all of it carried through to every export and share link. The Role pill got smarter too: click it and pick from common roles like Protagonist, Mentor or Villain, or just keep typing your own.
You can now share a single scene or chapter with beta readers in a couple of taps. Choose Quick Share from a document's menu in the binder, and the share window opens with just that document selected — no more unticking everything else in your manuscript.
Report a bug is now Give feedback: tell us about a bug, share an idea, or send anything else — just pick what kind of message it is. And it's finally available on phones, from the menu in the top corner, with screenshots straight from your camera roll.
Sharing and compiling on a phone also got a big upgrade: those windows now rise from the bottom of the screen at full width, with the document lists stacked so everything is readable and tappable — including the copy button, which now reliably puts your new share link on the clipboard.
You can now rearrange documents in the binder on a phone or tablet by pressing and holding an item, then dragging it to its new spot. Before, the list would scroll away as you tried to drag and cancel the move — a quick swipe still scrolls as usual, but a press-and-hold picks the item up.
We also fixed line breaks on iPad: if you write with a Magic Keyboard or another external keyboard, pressing Shift+Enter now drops to the next line within the same paragraph instead of starting a brand-new one.
One caveat: the on-screen keyboard on iPhone and iPad doesn't tell apps when Shift is held, so it sends the same signal for Shift+Enter as it does for a plain Enter. Because of that iOS limitation, this line-break shortcut only works with a hardware keyboard and we're unable to support it on the on-screen keyboard.
Creating a character or research note now offers a ready-made template: a clean, structured sheet with sections for the things you actually track — a character's basics, personality, relationships, goals and arc; a research note's summary, key facts, sources and open questions. Prefer a blank page? That's still one click away.
Every part of a sheet is yours to shape. Edit any field, rename a section, remove the ones you don't need, or add your own — nothing is fixed.
And your sheets aren't trapped in the app: export any character or research note to PDF, Word, ePub, or Markdown and it comes out looking just like it does on screen, headings and all.
Writing on a phone just got a lot smoother. The menu button in the top bar now opens a full-height panel that slides in from the right, with your account, session tools, view options, theme, and everything else laid out in clear groups instead of a cramped list.
Writing sprints go full-screen on mobile with a big countdown ring, tap-to-pick durations, and an optional word goal — and once a sprint is running, a live timer sits in the top bar so you always know how long is left, even after you close the panel.
Split view works on phones too: your two documents stack vertically, and the pane you're not typing in tucks away when the keyboard comes up so you get the full screen for writing.
The split editor grew up: drag the divider to resize the two panes exactly how you like, and open a corkboard in one pane while you write in the other.
Beta-reader share links can now include your margin notes as numbered endnotes — strictly opt-in, so your private notes stay private unless you tick the box.
Annotations got a polish pass too: click any note to edit it, cards line up beside their text and never overlap, and the label picker on corkboard cards opens right where you clicked. On phones, Share and What's New are now in the menu.
The editor toolbar and the top menu were redesigned around one idea: everything you need in one tidy row, and everything else one click away.
The toolbar now uses compact menus — paragraph styles, fonts with live previews, alignment, text color and highlight swatches — plus a font-size stepper and a ⋯ menu for the rest. Up top, a view switcher flips between Editor, Split, and Corkboard, a progress pill tracks your session word goal, and the Sprint button counts down right in the bar.
The Help menu (the ? icon) now gathers documentation, What's New, keyboard shortcuts, and bug reporting in one place.
Insanitomeium now keeps automatic snapshots of every document as you write, so an accidental delete — or an over-enthusiastic rewrite — is never permanent.
Snapshots are captured quietly in the background while you work. Open the version history at any time to read an earlier draft and restore it with one click; restoring is itself reversible, so you can never make things worse by looking.
Something not working the way it should? Open the Help menu (the ? icon) and choose "Give feedback" (originally labeled "Report a bug") to send us a description — and up to three screenshots — without ever leaving your manuscript.
Your privacy is built in: screenshots are automatically scrubbed of hidden photo data (like camera and location details) before they leave your browser, and the report tells you exactly what it includes before you send it. We read every report.
There is now a place to find out what is new: the News & Updates page lists every feature, improvement, and fix as it ships — you are reading it right now.
Keep an eye on the ✨ What's New button in the top bar: a small dot appears whenever something new has landed since your last visit.
You can now send your work to beta readers — no account required on their end. Click the new Share button in the top bar, pick the chapters and scenes you want to include, and Insanitomeium creates a private link you can send to anyone.
You stay in control the whole time: set the link to expire after 7, 30, or 90 days (or never), add an optional password, and revoke any link whenever you like from the Share window.
Select any passage in the editor and click the comment button to attach a note to it. The commented text gets a subtle underline, and your note appears as a card in the margin beside the passage it refers to — like scribbling on a printed draft.
On smaller screens your notes tuck into a tidy panel instead, so they never crowd the page. Edit or remove a note at any time; everything saves automatically.
Highlight any passage and the editor toolbar now shows exactly how many words and characters you have selected, right beside the document word count. Handy for trimming a scene to length or checking a contest excerpt against its limit.