Arc View and continuity checker¶
Once your Story Bible entities have appearances, Arc View turns them into a bird's-eye picture of who is on stage when — and the continuity checker flags the gaps that tend to slip past a read-through.
Arc View¶
Arc View is an SVG swim-lane timeline:
- Pages run left to right along the x-axis, in book order.
- Each entity that appears anywhere gets its own horizontal lane.
- Every appearance is a dot on that entity's lane, in the column of the page it appears on. The dot's color is the page's mood color, and its size reflects the entity's role — lead / protagonist entities draw a larger dot, the rest a smaller one.
- A polyline connects an entity's dots so you can follow its continuity across the book at a glance.
Click any dot to jump straight to that page in the editor.
Reading the lanes top-to-bottom tells you the cast of each page; reading a single lane left-to-right tells you one character's presence rhythm — long gaps, late entrances, early exits all jump out visually.
Relationship lines¶
Arc View has a Show relationships toggle (off by default to keep the view uncluttered). Turn it on to draw color-coded bezier curves between two entities' lanes wherever they share a page, using the relationship colors (ally = green, rival = red, family = blue, mentor = purple, romantic = pink, neutral = grey). The curves sit behind the dots so the timeline stays readable.
Continuity checker¶
The continuity checker produces advisory warnings — it never blocks anything, and it recomputes each time you open the view. It raises three kinds:
| Warning | When it fires |
|---|---|
| Entity disappears | An entity's last appearance is followed by a long run of pages to the end of the book — "{name} disappears after this page". |
| Absence gap | An entity is absent for a long stretch between two appearances — "{name} is absent until page {n}". |
| Empty page | A page has no linked entities at all — "No entities on this page". |
These are prompts, not errors: a character meant to vanish at the midpoint is fine, and an empty page may be a deliberate interlude. Treat the warnings as a checklist to glance over before you call a draft done.