Canvas

A Canvas is a page where you lay out cards and connectors freely to draw relationship maps and flowcharts. Character relationships, plot flow, scene order — laid out on one screen.

Creating a canvas

Canvases are created in the Documents tab. When you make a new page, choose whether it is a document page or a Canvas page. A Space can hold several canvases, and a deleted canvas stays in the Archive down to its cards and connectors, ready to restore.

Zooming and moving around the canvas

Zoom a canvas with Zoom in and Zoom out in the bar at its bottom right, or hold Ctrl (⌘ on a Mac) and scroll to zoom around the pointer. Scrolling moves the canvas. To drag it instead, hold Space and drag an empty spot, or pick Pan (H) in the toolbar at the bottom and switch back with Select (V). On a touch screen, drag with a finger.

Placing cards

Press Add card, then click the spot on the canvas where you want it. Cards usually carry the flow of the story — scenes, events, turns. For characters and places, place their existing World nodes rather than writing them out again (see below).

Shape, color, alignment: Give each card a shape (rectangle or ellipse), a color, and a text alignment (left, center, right) to tell them apart.
Moving and resizing: Drag a card to move it, drag a corner to resize it.
Group: Drag across empty space to select several cards at once, then join them with Group to move them together.
Page link: Link a page in the Space to a card with Link page, and the card shows that page's name; press the name to go to the page. Drag the name and the card moves. Unlink removes the link.

Placing World nodes

Instead of an ordinary card, place a World node on the canvas with Add world node. It's the actual character, place, or story node from your World, so you build the screen out of what you have already organized instead of typing it again. Turn on Follow type color and the card takes the color of its node type.

Connecting with connectors

Connectors join cards to express a relationship. Press Add connector, click the card to start from, then click the card to connect to. Connectors take a Label and a style, and you delete the ones you do not need.

Axis regions

A canvas always has a horizontal axis along the top, and a vertical axis down the left that you switch on with Vertical axis regions in the canvas settings. Divide an axis into named regions, and where you put a card carries meaning in itself — time on one axis, faction or intensity on the other, say.

Press + at the end of an axis to add a region, and drag a region's edge to resize it.
Press a region's label to name it (Region name), give it a color, or choose Add region on the left, Add region on the right, or Delete. When cards lie past the spot where a new region goes in, you're asked whether to move them out of the way — Shift or Create without shifting.
Behind the cards, the canvas is tinted a pale shade of a region's color, and where two colored regions cross, the two colors show blended.

Canvas settings

Open the canvas settings with the grid button in the top-left corner, where the two axes meet.

Vertical axis regions: Turns the vertical axis down the left side on or off.
Grid: Lays down a grid to line things up against.

Asking the agent to draw a canvas

Ask the agent in chat to draw a canvas — “lay out the relationships between the main characters on a canvas”, “put the order of events in chapter 3 on a canvas”. The canvas-drawing subagent (canvas_writer) builds it from your World nodes and the pages you point to: World nodes go on as node cards, and the links between them become connectors.

It makes a new canvas page, or redraws a canvas you already have. A redraw replaces everything on that canvas, and the cards it replaces go to the Archive.
The chat keeps Canvas and the canvas's name on one line. While it works, it shows Drawing the canvas; when it's done, Open appears at its end, and Overwrite too when it redrew a canvas you already had. If that canvas is open, it updates on screen.
It draws straight away, whatever your Edit permission is set to.
On the Max plan, pick the model that draws it in the Canvas row of Detailed models.