Canvas

A Canvas is where you organize the pieces of your work visually. Character relationships, plot flow, scene order — laid out so you take them in at a glance.

Creating a canvas

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

Placing cards

Press the Card button, then click the spot on the canvas where you want it. Cards usually carry the flow of the story — scenes, events, turns. Characters and places are better placed as existing World nodes than written 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 group the selection to move them together.
• Page link: Link a page in the Space to a card and press it to jump straight there. Unlink at any time.

Placing World nodes

Instead of an ordinary card, place a World node on the canvas. It is the very character, place, or story node that lives in the 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 the connector button, 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.

Bands

Bands, cut along the horizontal and vertical axes, lie behind the cards in a pale color, so where you put a card carries meaning in itself — one axis time, the other faction or intensity, say. Set the horizontal and vertical axis divisions in the canvas settings and name each band. Bands go in at any time, inserted to the left or the right.

Canvas settings

• Show grid: Lays down a grid to line things up against.
• Keep names large when zoomed out: Stops card names and labels from shrinking too far as you zoom out.