Scrivelle is a word processor for novelists on the Mac: Word documents on real pages, your cast and your notes beside the text, and a writing assistant on the page — Apple’s own on-device model, or the AI service you already use.
Support. This page is the User Guide, with every feature explained. Questions, problems and ideas: write to gh0stzz83@gmail.com. The privacy policy says what the app does with your writing (in short: nothing leaves your Mac unless you connect an AI service and ask it something).
Scrivelle is a word processor for novelists on the Mac. It opens and saves Word documents, lays your book out on real pages as you write, keeps the cast and the world of your story beside the text, and brings a writing assistant to the page — Apple’s own on-device model, or the AI service you already pay for.
This guide covers everything in the app. The first three sections are enough to start writing.
Open the app. A new, empty document is waiting: a page in the middle, the ribbon above it, the status bar below. Start typing.
The window, top to bottom.
Your first document. Home ▸ New starts a fresh document, Home ▸ Open opens one, and Home ▸ Recent lists what you worked on lately. ⌘S saves; the first time, you choose the name and the format.
Formats. Scrivelle reads and writes Word documents (.docx), its own web documents (.html),
Markdown (.md) and plain text (.txt). Word is the format to use with editors, agents and
other word processors: formatting, styles, comments, tracked changes, pictures, the cast and
your notes all travel in it.
Text. The Home tab has the font, size, bold, italic, underline, colour and highlight, the paragraph alignment, lists and indents. Double-click a word to select it; triple-click selects a paragraph. The usual shortcuts work: ⌘B, ⌘I, ⌘U, ⌘Z to undo, ⇧⌘Z to redo.
Styles. The Styles gallery on the Home tab holds Normal, the headings, Title, Subtitle and
any styles of your own. A style sets the look of a whole paragraph at once, and changing a style
changes every paragraph that uses it. Right-click a style for Modify Style…; New Style…
makes one from the paragraph at the caret. Heading 1 is a chapter and Heading 2 a scene (see
Chapters). Styles live in the document and go into .docx as Word styles.
Paragraphs. Home ▸ Paragraph (the small arrow in the group’s corner) sets indents, spacing, line height and the Line and Page Breaks rules — keep with next, keep lines together, page break before, widow and orphan control — which the pages honour on screen and in print.
Spelling. Misspelled words get a red underline. Right-click one for suggestions and Learn Spelling. This works on the page and in every text field of the Manuscript pane.
Find and replace. ⌘F opens Find, ⇧⌘H Replace. Matches are highlighted on the page; Enter goes to the next.
Scene breaks. Manuscript ▸ Scene break inserts a centred * * *.
Clear formatting (Home) returns the selection to the paragraph’s style.
Page setup. The Layout tab sets the paper size (Letter, A4 and more), the orientation and the margins. The page on screen is the page that prints.
Headers, footers and page numbers. Insert ▸ Header and Insert ▸ Footer set text that repeats on every page. Insert ▸ Page Number puts “Page 3” bottom right (where a new document starts out), bottom centre, top right, or nowhere.
Chapter titles in the running head. New documents show each chapter’s title at the top of every page of that chapter, as a ruled line — “CHAPTER 3 · FIRST ACQUAINTANCES” — instead of as a heading in the text. See Chapters for how to turn this off and on.
Layout modes. The status bar switches between Print Layout (pages, the default) and Web Layout (one continuous sheet). Zoom with the slider, ⌘+ and ⌘−, or pinch on the trackpad.
Printing and PDF. File ▸ Print prints the pages you see, headers and numbers included. File ▸ Export to PDF writes the same pages to a PDF.
The Insert tab adds pictures from a file (or paste or drop one), shapes, text boxes
and tables. Select one and its own tab appears: wrap the text around it or run the text
over it, size it, rotate it, position it on the page, group several, give a table borders and
shading, merge cells. Pictures and shapes go into .docx as Word objects.
Track changes. Review ▸ Track Changes records every insertion, deletion and formatting
change with your name and the time. Accept and Reject work on the change at the caret or on
all of them; Previous and Next step through them. The markup can be shown in full, as a
simple view, or hidden. Changes travel in .docx as Word revisions, so an editor using Word
sees them, and theirs come back to you.
Comments. Review ▸ Comment (⌥⌘A) attaches a comment to the selection. Comments sit in the
margin beside their text; reply to one, resolve it, or delete it. They travel in .docx too.
Your name. Comments and changes carry the name of your macOS account.
Home ▸ Manuscript (⌥⌘M) opens the Manuscript pane. It has four tabs.
Your book’s structure: chapters are Heading 1 paragraphs, scenes Heading 2, each with its word count. The pane counts your words today against a daily goal you set, per document, starting afresh each day.
* * *.A profile for everyone in the story: name, the other names the text uses for them, their role, and your notes. Each character is traced through the manuscript — every mention, grouped by chapter with its sentence, a click away. Tell their history has the assistant read those passages and tell what happens to the character, chapter by chapter, from the text alone. Generate invents a new character from a brief, in the world of your story, as a sheet you can add to the cast with one click. The cast is saved inside the document.
World notes — places, customs, lore, anything the story needs remembered — as titled pages, saved with the document. Insert puts a note into the manuscript at the caret.
Series. Books in a series share their cast and world notes through a series file. New series… creates one next to the book; Join series… links a book to an existing one. Mark a character or a note as shared and every book in the series has it.
A research companion: ask what the Arctic looks like at night, how the first people made fire, what a Victorian letter sounded like, and put the answer into the manuscript with Insert. When the assistant reads the whole book (see below), Ask also answers questions about your own story — who promised what, where things stand — from the text, naming the chapter.
The Assistant tab puts the assistant to your text. Select a passage, or just leave the caret in a paragraph, and choose:
The answer streams into the assistant pane. Nothing touches your manuscript until you choose Replace, Insert or Apply as tracked changes — the last turns a rewrite or a proofread into insertions and deletions you accept or reject one by one. Right-click a selection for Rewrite with Assistant and Proofread Selection. Stop stops a request.
Apple Intelligence, on this Mac, is the default: nothing leaves your computer, there is no account and no key. It needs macOS 26 or later on an Apple silicon Mac with Apple Intelligence turned on in System Settings. It reads about 1,400 words at a time and writes short passages.
Your own AI. Assistant ▸ AI Settings (or Settings ▸ Writing assistant) lets you choose instead:
Each card walks you through it: a key is three steps — open the key page, create and copy a key, paste it — and Scrivelle checks the connection before keeping it. The models on offer appear in a menu with the best one for writing first. Keys and sign-ins are kept on this Mac, in the app’s own folder, and only ever sent to the provider they belong to. The assistant pane’s footer always says which engine is answering and where your text goes.
Also in AI Settings:
.docx to keep
everything.Scrivelle ▸ Settings… (⌘,):
| Action | Keys |
|---|---|
| New, Open, Save, Save As | ⌘N, ⌘O, ⌘S, ⇧⌘S |
| Print, Export to PDF | ⌘P, ⇧⌘E |
| Undo, Redo | ⌘Z, ⇧⌘Z |
| Find, Find next, Replace | ⌘F, ⌘G, ⇧⌘H |
| Bold, Italic, Underline | ⌘B, ⌘I, ⌘U |
| Grow / shrink the font | ⇧⌘> / ⇧⌘< |
| Comment | ⌥⌘A |
| Manuscript pane | ⌥⌘M |
| Zoom in / out | ⌘+ / ⌘− |
| Settings | ⌘, |
ollama pull gemma3 in Terminal once.Scrivelle keeps your documents wherever you save them and its settings on your Mac. It has no account, collects nothing and sends nothing anywhere on its own. Text leaves your Mac only when you run the assistant with a provider you connected, and then only to that provider, under its terms. See the privacy policy for the details.