Annotations
An annotation is a note to yourself about a specific paragraph: “cliché — rewrite”, “check this against the timeline”, “does she know this yet?”. You write the remark from the margin and it stays attached to those words while you keep working — one remark per paragraph, ticked off when you have dealt with it.
Annotations work the same way everywhere there is prose — manuscript sections, notes, and an entity’s description.
Annotating a passage
Section titled “Annotating a passage”Hover the paragraph you want to remark on. The drag handle appears in the left margin as usual, and a speech-bubble button appears in the right margin, lined up with it.
Click it and a small box opens. Type your remark and click Annotate (or press Cmd/Ctrl + Enter). Your cursor stays exactly where you left it — there is nothing to select first, and the sidebar stays as you had it, so writing a remark doesn’t pull you out of the paragraph.
The paragraph picks up a soft amber underline. Click it any time to jump to its thread.
Going back to a remark
Section titled “Going back to a remark”Once a paragraph carries an annotation, its margin button turns amber and changes job: clicking it no longer starts a new remark, it opens the Annotations panel in the right-hand sidebar and scrolls to the thread for that paragraph. Clicking the underlined text does the same thing.
So the margin button is “write a remark here” on a plain paragraph and “show me what I wrote here” on an annotated one. To reply to the remark, resolve it or delete it, use the thread in the panel.
The Annotations panel
Section titled “The Annotations panel”Open the right-hand sidebar and choose Annotations. It lists every thread on the document you are looking at, oldest first, each showing the passage it is about above the remarks written on it.
From a thread you can:
- Find — scroll the document to the passage the remark is about. Handy in a long chapter, where the thread you are reading may be about a paragraph several screens away. It doesn’t appear on a detached thread, since there is no longer any text to scroll to.
- Resolved — tick the box to retire the thread without losing it. Untick it to bring it back.
- Delete — the bin icon removes the thread, its remark, and the underline on the text. This one is permanent.
Clicking a thread highlights it; clicking the underlined passage in the document — or its amber margin button — scrolls the panel to its thread.
Resolving
Section titled “Resolving”Ticking Resolved takes the amber underline off the passage. The text goes back to looking like ordinary text, so a chapter you have worked through stops being striped with marks for remarks you have already dealt with.
The thread itself is kept. It moves behind the Show resolved checkbox at the top of the panel, and unticking Resolved puts the underline back exactly where it was. Find still works on a resolved thread, which is how you get back to a passage whose mark is no longer visible.
When the annotated text is deleted
Section titled “When the annotated text is deleted”If you delete the words an annotation was attached to, the remark is not deleted with them. The thread stays in the panel, marked Detached, still showing the passage it used to be about.
This is deliberate: the remark is something you wrote, and deleting a sentence should not silently throw away the thought you had about it. If the deletion was a mistake, undo puts the text back and the thread re-attaches itself — nothing to repair by hand.
A detached thread can be resolved or deleted like any other once you have dealt with it.
Annotations and backups
Section titled “Annotations and backups”Annotations are part of your project. They are included in workspace archives and travel with a project when you duplicate it.
Because they are excluded from every export, the archive is the only copy — which is worth knowing if you rely on annotations heavily and back up rarely.