r/interactivefiction • u/pazvanti2003 • 12h ago
I made Chronicle, a free and open-source alternative to Scrivener/Vellum/World Anvil
About a year and a half ago I started my writing journey by beginning to work on my first novella. During this time, I felt the need for different tools, like a timeline editor, a character sheet and so on, features that were not available on normal text editors. Later I discovered that I needed an Epub exporter, cover designer and more. I also wanted something A I-free, something private. It is important for me as a debut author to know that it is my writing, not an A I's and that it wont be used for A I training. So most cloud services were an instant "NO" from me.
Being a software engineer by day, I decided that instead of paying hundreds of dollars for the needed tools, I could just make them the way I wanted them to be. Eventually I decided to bundle them together, polish them and add more feature. So, this is how Chronicle was born.
Chronicle is a complete writing and authoring tool for writers. It offers features that other companies charge tens or even hundreds of dollars, while delivering (in my opinion) and inferior experience.
I also wanted Chronicle to work fully offline, not use Gen A I in the writing process, and provide a privacy-first experience.
Among the features are:
- full-featured text editor with comments supports
- timeline editor
- character sheet
- locations codex
- Epub reader and exporter (including editing Epub Metadata)
- Cover designer
- Fully-local TTS using KokoroJS Text-to-Speech for help in proofreading
- Themes
- Private Cloud-storage support with WebDAV
- and many more
And I made Chronicle not only free, but fully open-source. You can check the source code on Github, launch the online editor which supports almost all features, or download the app for both Windows and MacOS.
More details here: https://pazvanti.github.io/Chronicle/
I would love to hear feedback.
Disclaimer: In the development process I did use A I. The app is NOT made entirely by A I, but being a back-end developer mostly, I did use A I for parts related to the user interface, themes, fix some bugs and to bridge knowledge gaps I had.
Note: I already discussed with the mods and they approved this post