Manuscript Tools¶
The Manuscript Tools plugin helps you revise your text. It checks style, cleans up formatting artifacts, and measures readability. The goal is not to tell you how to write, but to highlight patterns you may have overlooked.
The plugin runs entirely locally. No text is sent to external services.
Style Checks¶
Style checks find patterns that disrupt reading flow or make text feel vague: filler words, passive voice, long sentences, word repetitions, excessive adverbs, and redundant phrases. Each finding is a suggestion, not a rule.
- Filler words: language-specific catalogs (e.g. "actually", "basically", "really" for English)
- Passive voice: marks passive constructions; exceptions for scientific or formal writing
- Long sentences: configurable threshold (default: 25 words)
- Word repetitions: within a configurable window (default: 50 words), excluding stop words
- Adverb density: flags high density of -ly/-lich adverbs per paragraph
- Redundant phrases: conservative list ("personal opinion", "future plans", etc.)
Text Sanitization¶
Cleans invisible junk from pasted content (Word, Google Docs, browsers): non-breaking spaces, zero-width characters, BOM, empty tags, style attributes, multiple whitespace. Can run manually per chapter or automatically on import.
Text Metrics¶
- Word count, character count, paragraphs, sentences, estimated pages
- Flesch-Kincaid readability index (language-specific variants)
- Average sentence length and word length
- Adjective and adverb density
- Estimated reading time (configurable words/minute)
- Filler word percentage and passive voice percentage
All metrics are shown per chapter and as a book overview in the quality tab.
The Quality tab¶
Open a book, go to Book metadata → Quality to see the full report. Beyond the raw metrics it adds four things that help you read the numbers, not just collect them.
Chapter comparison table¶
Every chapter is a row, every metric a column (words, sentences, Flesch, filler %, passive %, adverb %, long sentences). Cells are colour-coded like a traffic light so outliers stand out at a glance, and the table has a totals row at the bottom. The navigable metrics (filler, passive, adverb, long sentences) are clickable: a click jumps the editor to the first matching finding in that chapter. A value more than twice the book average is flagged with a tooltip telling you how it compares.
Genre / Flesch benchmark¶
Below the summary, a benchmark scale plots your book's average Flesch reading-ease score against four reference bands (Easy / Readable / Demanding / Academic) and four genre markers (Fiction / Non-fiction / Scientific / Children's). It answers the question the bare number cannot: "Is this readability right for the kind of book I am writing?" A children's book and a scientific monograph live at opposite ends of the scale, and both can be correct.
Nested-sentence candidates (Schachtelsatz-Kandidaten)¶
A per-chapter, collapsible list of the longest and most deeply-nested sentences in your manuscript. Each entry shows the opening words of the sentence plus its word count and the number of subordinate clauses. These are sentences that might benefit from being split — a suggestion, never a rule. The list is ranked client-side, so it works the same offline.
Analysis-scope disclaimer¶
A short notice at the bottom of the report states plainly what it does and does not do: it analyses stylistic features, not content. Argument quality, factual accuracy, tone consistency, and chapter structure are NOT checked. The report is a complement to a human edit, not a replacement for one. A second note next to the word count explains exactly what is counted (every word in the body text including headings; formatting is not counted), so the number is honest and may differ slightly from other editors.
Download the report¶
Two buttons at the top of the tab export the full report as Markdown (.md) or PDF — the chapter table, the averages, the Flesch benchmark, and the nested-sentence list all travel with it.
Configuration¶
Settings under Settings > Plugins > Manuscript Tools: sentence length threshold, repetition window, reading speed, filler word list (per language), auto-sanitization on import, active checks toggle. Settings are stored per book.