Documents

A document is a multi-page rich-text editor that lives as a card on your canvas. It has a page tree, one row of formatting tools, tables you can grow, images, code blocks and embedded boards, real-time co-editing with visible cursors, and a side panel with every comment and a find and replace across all its pages. Open it full screen or docked beside the canvas.

Updated October 24, 2026

A document is where the writing goes. It lives as a card on a canvas, so a treatment sits beside the references it came from rather than in a different application.

Add one with the doc tool in the rail. It opens straight away beside the canvas (full screen on a phone) with its title selected: type a name, press Enter, and you are writing.

An empty document offers two other ways in under its Start writing…: A screenplay turns it into a script, and Import a script makes it the Final Draft or Fountain script you pick, title page and all, named after it. Both go once you write a word.

Starting from a treatment

The director's treatment page hands you a document to start from. Press its button, and once you are signed in a treatment document is added to a cluster in your own workspace and opens. It holds a cover, then a page for each section: concept, tone and references, look and light, casting, wardrobe and art direction, locations, and edit, music and pace. Each page has a line saying what goes on it. Replace the lines with your own, bring the chosen images in, and export a PDF.

Until you change something in it, the treatment is a template: it does not count toward your cards and search does not list it. Your first change makes it your document like any other.

Opening

Two modes:

• Full screen — the document fills the window
• Side — docked beside the canvas, resizable, so you can write while looking at the board

On the canvas, a document with nothing in it says Empty on its card and offers Start writing; one with words shows its first lines, with Beside to open it docked and Open for full screen.

Double-clicking a document card opens it in whichever mode you used last, so if you work docked you stay docked. On a phone or a tablet, tap the card twice. The dock and full screen swap either way from the buttons in the document's header.

A docked document is held by the workspace, not by the canvas underneath it. You can open other clusters, drill into nested ones, and move around the sidebar with the document still open beside you — it stays put until you close it. Docking a document also takes over the split view pane, since there is only one.

A document reopens where you left it — the same page, scrolled to the same spot — even after you close the tab. That position is remembered per browser, not synced between devices. Following a collaborator's avatar into a document still takes you to where they are.

Two documents side by side

With a document docked, open another one on the board and it takes the board's place, so the two sit side by side: a script beside its treatment, notes beside the draft they are about. Each keeps its own toolbar, find and zoom, and ⌘Z and ⌘F act on the one you are working in. The sidebar tucks away while both are open; ⌘B brings it back. Opening a third puts it in place of the second, and a card's Open beside button still changes which one is docked.

× on either document brings the board back; close the docked one and the other moves into the dock. Going to another cluster closes the one from the board you left, and the docked one stays. On a phone, where there is room for one, the document you open takes the dock instead.

Layout

The header runs across the top: the page list's button, where the document is and its title (click the title to rename it), the faces of whoever else is in it (click one to go to where they are), Share, Comments, Messages, the dock and full screen switch, and close. The footer runs along the bottom: whether your changes are saved (see Saving), the word count (in a screenplay, the page you're on, of how many, and the scenes), and the zoom.

Pages on the left — a hierarchical tree. Documents are genuinely multi-page, and pages nest. A page holds as much as you write: set to real pages, its text flows from one sheet onto the next as you type, so long-form writing does not stop to manage pagination. Collapsing a page's sub-pages (the arrow beside it) is yours alone: it is remembered on this device and changes nothing for anyone else in the document. The button at the left of the header hides the list and brings it back. On a phone or a touch tablet the list is a drawer that the same button opens (in a screenplay the drawer also lists the scenes).

Bookmarks under the page tree — durable anchors into specific places in the text, which survive editing around them. Add one with Bookmark this spot in the toolbar's Insert menu (a screenplay has it on its toolbar); click it in the list to jump there.

The body in the middle, with the toolbar over it.

The side panel on the right, when you open it with Comments in the header: every comment in the document, and Find across all its pages. In a screenplay it holds the elements too. It stays open for the next document you open, until you close it. On a phone it comes up from the bottom, over the document, and a tap on the document, a drag down or Esc puts it away.

Zoom runs from 25% to 200%, from the footer or ⌘= and ⌘−.

On a phone the text stays full size. A document set to real pages shows as one continuous sheet there (its exports and wider screens keep the pages), and a screenplay fits its text column to the screen, with the margins (and the comment dots in them) a swipe away.

The same goes wherever a document is narrower than a page, on any screen: docked beside the board, one of two side by side, or in a small window. A screenplay fits its text column to the width, at full size where there is room, and its lines still break where the printed page breaks them. Prose takes narrower margins on screen. The page list tucks away to the arrow at its edge, which brings it back for as long as the document stays that narrow without changing how it opens anywhere else.

Writing and formatting

The toolbar is one row over the page:

• the document's type, Document or Screenplay
• undo and redo
• the text style (body, headings, quote), the font and the size
• bold, italic, underline, strikethrough and code, the text colour and highlight, and clear formatting
• bulleted, numbered and task lists, and alignment
• link and comment
• Insert
• Find, and ⋯ with the layout (pageless, or real pages), the zoom, Export and the word and character counts

When the window is too narrow for all of it, the tools you reach for least move into ⋯ first, so the row never breaks onto a second line and every tool is still a click away. Every one has a keyboard shortcut. To reach the toolbar from the keyboard, press ⌥F10 (Alt+F10 on Windows) in the text; the arrow keys move along it, and Esc brings you back to where you were typing.

A screenplay's row is its own: its type, undo and redo, link, comment and bookmark, and ⋯. Its elements are in the side panel.

Right-click a selection for cut, copy, paste, formatting, links and comments. Right-click a word with nothing selected — or ⇧-right-click anywhere — for your browser's own menu, with its spelling suggestions.

Text pasted from Google Docs, Word or a web page keeps its structure and emphasis — headings, lists, links, bold, italic, real colours — but drops the source's font, size, background and default black ink, so it takes on the document's own typography instead of arriving as a patch of 11pt Arial. Text copied from another Clusters note or document keeps everything. Clear formatting (⌘\) strips the selection back to plain; links and comments stay.

On a phone or a tablet

On a phone the tools ride on the keyboard while you write: the text style, bold, italic and underline, the three lists, link, comment, Insert, and More formatting for the rest. The keyboard button at the row's end puts the keyboard away. The header holds close, the page list, the title with whether it is saved under it, Share, and ⋯, which has Comments, Find, Messages, the document's type and layout, the zoom, Export and the counts. In either menu, a choice with more under it, such as Font, Text colour or Export, opens in the menu's place, with ‹ at its top to go back.

On a tablet the toolbar keeps its one row over the page, its tools a finger's size, with more of them under ⋯ to make the room.

Find and replace

⌘F, or Find in the toolbar, opens Find in the side panel, with the words you had selected. It searches All pages of the document, open or not, or just This page; Aa matches the case you typed, and Whole word only whole words. The hits are listed page by page with the words around them, and lit in the text: Enter and ⇧Enter step through them, opening the page each one is on, and clicking one goes straight to it.

Replace replaces the hit that is lit and moves on to the next. Replace all replaces every hit on every page and says how many, on how many pages; the toast's Undo takes them all back. Esc returns you to the text with the hit selected.

Tables

Insert › Table adds one. With the caret in a table, a bar sits over its top right corner: Row adds a row above or below the one you are in, or deletes it; Column does the same for columns; Header row turns the first row's header on and off; and Delete table deletes it, with an Undo in the toast. Each is a step of its own for ⌘Z. In a table, ⌥F10 goes to its bar rather than the toolbar.

Over a table too narrow for the words, Row and Column show as icons and Header row moves into Row's menu.

Insert

The Insert menu adds:

• Image
• Table
• Divider
• Code block
• Embed cluster — a whole cluster, rendered inside the document
• Bookmark this spot

You can also paste an image, or drop one in from your computer. While it uploads it shows in the spot it will land, with how far it has got, and you can cancel it there; if the upload fails, it says so in the same spot, with Retry.

Reading a document you can only view

With view access the toolbar is Find, the zoom and Export, and the header says View only. You can search every page, read every comment, and export the document; the tools that change it are not there.

Working together

Documents are collaborative in real time, with peer cursors and selections visible as people type. Edits merge rather than overwriting.

If the cluster is restored to an earlier version while you have a document open, or someone moves cards into it, the cluster reloads, and the document reopens where you were and says what happened. If that took anything off the page you had open (a restore to before you wrote it, or your last few words before they were saved), it offers you the page as you had it, to copy and paste back what you want to keep.

Saving

There is nothing to save by hand: each change goes to the cluster as you make it. The footer says where your changes are, and only what the cluster has confirmed:

• Saving…: a change is on its way.
• Saved: the cluster has told this device it holds every change you made.
• Reconnecting or Offline: the cluster can't be reached. Your changes are kept on this device and go up when it is back. If this device couldn't keep a copy (its storage is full), the footer says keep this tab open instead, because the open tab is then the only place they are.
• Couldn't save: the cluster couldn't be reached and a save failed. Your changes are kept on this device, as above.
• View only — changes aren't saved: the cluster is treating you as a viewer, for example because your access changed while the document was open, so it isn't keeping what you type.
• Can't save — access ended: you no longer have access to the cluster.

On a phone, the line under the title says the same in a word. Someone who can only view the document sees no save state: the header says View only.

Undo

Two histories, matching how documents are edited:

• Typing: ⌘Z while the caret is in the text undoes your writing, as in any editor.
• Structure: ⌘Z with the document open but the caret elsewhere undoes page operations — deletes, moves, renames. Deleting a page with its sub-pages, comments and bookmarks is one step, and page deletes also offer an undo toast.

Both undo only your edits, never a collaborator's.

Comments, tags and links

The margins do a lot of work:

• Inline comments on a text range, with dots in the right margin, and every one of them in the side panel
• Tag ranges underlining text, with dots in the left margin
• Suggested entities — names the app noticed, with a tick or a cross in the margin to confirm or dismiss
• Links and mentions — @ anything, with hover previews
• Backlinks — everywhere this document is referenced from

Screenplays

Documents have a dedicated screenplay mode with industry-standard formatting, correct pagination, a scene navigator, a title page, and Final Draft and Fountain import and export.

Exporting

PDF, Markdown, HTML, and for screenplays .fdx and .fountain, from ⋯ › Export. See Exporting documents.

Documents versus notes

If you find yourself scrolling inside a note, you wanted a document.

Machine-readable: /docs/documents.md · /llms.txt
What changed and when: /changelog