A manuscript editor for long projects
Chapters and scenes in a binder, a clean page in the middle, and Asten’s red marks in the margin. Asten adds marks beside the text and never changes it.
In short
The Asten desk is a manuscript editor for long-form writing. It has a binder of chapters, scenes, notes, and sources; a rich-text page; comments; find; word counts; a letter-sized page view; track-change marks; and named snapshots. Diagnostics sit in the margin and never rewrite your text.
A binder
Manuscript, chapters, scenes, notes, and sources in one tree. Exclude a scene from compile without deleting it.
The page
Headings, emphasis, and the formatting a manuscript needs. Literata on warm paper. Nothing animated near your words.
Comments and track changes
Leave notes to yourself or an editor. Insertions and deletions show as marks you can read back.
Page view
A letter-sized sheet with a running header, so you can feel how long the chapter is. It is not a typesetter.
Find, counts, snapshots
Find next and previous, live word counts, and named snapshots you can restore without any cloud.
Red in the margin
When a page disagrees with your canon, the mark appears beside the sentence, with the evidence one click away.
Example: the binder and the page
Chapter 19
The harbor at dawn
The tide came in grey over the harbor at Veld, carrying the smell of last night’s fires.
Mira pushed her black hair out of her eyes and listened for the bell.
“You’re late,” Oren said, though he had only just arrived himself.
What is the desk for?
The desk is where the book gets written. Everything else in Asten (canon, cast, time, world) exists to serve the page, and none of it is required before you start typing.
Think of it as a writer’s subset of a word processor: the parts you use every day on a manuscript, without the layout features you only need for a printed brochure. When the book needs to leave, you compile it to Markdown, Fountain, HTML, Word, EPUB, or Final Draft.
How does the binder work?
The binder is a tree. A manuscript holds chapters; chapters hold scenes. Notes and sources live alongside the prose, so research is one click from the scene that needs it.
- Reorder chapters and scenes by moving them in the tree.
- Mark a scene as excluded from compile while you decide its fate.
- Keep wiki pages, notes, and sources in the same project, never in a separate app.
What the desk is not
Asten is not trying to be Word. Track changes are insertion and deletion marks, not a full review workflow. Find moves one match at a time. Page view is a letter sheet for the feel of length, not a print-production engine. These are deliberate limits, written down so nobody is surprised.
About the desk
Is the Asten desk a replacement for Microsoft Word?
Can I import an existing manuscript into Asten?
How do I see how long my book is in Asten?
Keep reading
Try the pre-alpha
Open the workbench in your browser on a sample novel, or download release 0.0.1b for Windows or Linux.