Advanced Settings

Advanced Settings is where you change how a story is put together: which features each view shows and where, the story's structure, what outside viewers can see, how characters join scenes, what the story's parts are called, and which text formats the editor offers.

It's for the story's owner and editors. Viewers and visitors don't have it (see Sharing & Permissions), and it isn't available on a phone-sized screen.

Open Advanced Settings

1. Click the Menu button at the right end of the view's header.
2. Choose Advanced Settings….

The window opens on the Layout tab. It has six tabs: Layout, Structure, Presentation, Automation, Labeling and Text Formats.

You can also reach the Text Formats tab while you write: the text format menu's More… opens the window on it (see Add Text Formats).

Saving Your Changes

Nothing you change in the window applies until you click Save. Save applies the changes from every tab at once, as a single step you can take back with Undo in the view's header.

• Cancel (or Esc) closes the window without applying anything. If you've made changes, it asks Discard unsaved changes? first: choose Discard to close, or Keep editing to go back.
• Clicking outside the window doesn't close it.
• If someone else is editing the story, the window tells you who, and settings can't be changed until they're done. If the story is open in another of your own windows, click Edit here to carry on in this one.

Layout

The Layout tab decides which features each view shows, in which sections, and in what order. It starts with Choose a layout to edit: a card for each layout.

• Main Views: the story's views (Home, Timeline, the scene cards, Page, the character cards and, when the story has it, Story Stats) and the two slideshows.
• Editors: the Edit Window for the story's details, for a scene and for a character.

The cards use your story's own names, so they may read Chapter Cards or Episode Slides.

Click a card to open that layout. All Layouts, at the top left, takes you back to the cards.

On the left are the features you can add: Custom Features (once the story has some) and Prewrite Features. On the right are the layout's sections, each with the features it shows, in order.

• Add a feature: drag it from the left into a section, or click its + (Add to this layout) and pick a section. If the feature also belongs in other views, a bar asks whether to add it there too: Add everywhere or Just here.
• Move a feature: drag it to a new place in its section, or into another section.
• Remove a feature: drag it back onto the list on the left. It stays in the story, ready to add again. A feature marked with a red * is required in this view and can't be removed.
• Move a section: in the layouts that allow it, drag the section by its header.
• Learn more: the i beside a feature opens its article right in the Advanced Settings window. The back arrow at the top (or Esc) takes you back to where you were.

Section and Feature Settings

Most sections and features have a pencil button, Edit Settings. What you can change depends on the view and the feature:

• Sections: the Label (and whether it shows), a Tooltip, Filtering (Can show and hide adds the section to the view's filter menu), an Empty Message, and how its items flow, collapse, pin or pad.
• Features: the Label, a Tooltip, the Style, Filtering, the Width, an Empty Message, and, for some features, their options, range or colors.

A value slider, such as Tone -/+, a Dynamics gauge or a Range Input, also has its Range and Colors, and Up and down: what to call a rise and a fall from one scene to the next. Type a word in When it goes up and When it goes down (Better and Worse, say, or Rising and Easing); the Stats view's overview and the Story Report use them. Leave them blank for Up and Down.

Once you change a feature's label, a menu beside it chooses where the new label applies: Change Everywhere or This View Only. Click Save in the small window to keep your changes; like everything else here, they apply when you save Advanced Settings.

New Sections

In the Timeline, the scene and character cards, Page and the editors, a New Section chip sits beside the layout's name. Drag it between two sections to add an empty one there, then drag features into it and give it a label with Edit Settings.

Custom Features

When Prewrite's features don't cover something, make your own.

1. Drag the New Feature chip into a section, or click the + (New Custom Feature) beside the features list.
2. Pick the type of feature. For scenes, stories and characters, that's a Text Input, Select Input or Tags Input; scenes also have a Range Input, and the story a Links Section. In Story Stats, you pick a Pie Chart, Range Chart or Bar Chart and the data it tracks.
3. Name it, and set its options if it has any.
4. Choose the other views it should show in, and in which section. For a feature you fill in, its editor is always included, because that's where you enter its content.
5. Click Create.

Your features appear under Custom Features in the layouts they fit, where you place them like any other. To delete one from the story entirely, click its trash button (Remove this custom feature entirely) and confirm. Its placements go with it when you save.

Structure

The Structure tab opens on the structure your story uses now, with its acts. Change Structure shows every structure you can switch to: classic storytelling structures, plus any copies you've made in this story.

• Switch To moves your story to that structure. Your scenes are spread across its acts when you save.
• Copy Structure, on the current structure, makes a copy you can rename, describe and change: add, remove, reorder, rename and recolor acts.
• Delete removes a structure you made, as long as the story isn't using it.

The steps are in Switching to a Different Structure and Customizing a Structure.

Presentation

When you make a story shareable, anyone with its link can view it. The Presentation tab chooses what those outside viewers see. It doesn't change what you or your collaborators see.

• Each view has a card. Its switch shows or hides the whole view.
• The checkmarks in a card show or hide that view's features, so you can share a view but keep some of what it shows to yourself.
• The cards for the slideshows and the editors have checkmarks only.

If you hide every view, a warning says outside viewers will only see the story's slideshow.

To make a story shareable in the first place, see Public Viewers.

Automation

The Automation tab has one setting: how characters are added to scenes.

• Automatic: Characters will be added to your scene if they have dialogue or their name appears in descriptive action.
• Manual: Characters must be added to each scene manually. This is the setting until you change it.
• Automatic + Manual: you can add characters yourself too, but you can't remove one that appears in the scene's text.

With Automatic, dropping a character onto a scene doesn't add it. A message, Characters are added automatically, explains why.

Labeling

The Labeling tab renames the core parts of your story everywhere they appear. A novel might call scenes Chapters; a podcast, Episodes.

• Set the singular and plural for the story, scenes and characters. Scenes also have names for their heading and their content, when the template has them.
• Presets fills in a whole set at once: Screenplay, Podcast, YouTube Video, Business Story or Short Story.
• A field you clear goes back to its default name.

Text Formats

The Text Formats tab chooses which text formats the editor's format menu offers for your scenes' main text, in three groups: Standard, Screenplay and Creator. Check the ones you want.

• Only the Screenplay formats carry over when you export to Final Draft.
• A format you turn off still shows in the menu while text in the scene uses it.
• If you turn every format off, your scenes go back to Prewrite's default set: the Screenplay formats.