Ellipsus Release Notes

We've released dozens of new features, improvements, and fixes since our last update. (And with 400k of you writing, we love to see it! 🎉)
Here's your TL;DR on all the things we shipped in the past few months!

More people are writing on Ellipsus than ever before—and reading, too. (That's right, our new Reader links have made quite the splash!) With 400k writers in Ellipsus working on 4 million docs ... whoever said "reading is dead" needs to take a look at these numbers! 😵‍💫
We've released dozens of features, improvements, and fixes since our last update. Here's your TL;DR in case you missed it!

Introducing: the Reader!

This month's crowning glory is the Reader. 👑
(Oh, it's beautiful...)
Now, you can share Reader links to your work with friends and on socials. In the Reader, you can:

• Enable props to get appreciation from readers—when reading, show your love with the 👏 button!
• Enable comments and replies for fangirling and feedback. Add gifs, emojis, and spoilers for ye old internet vibes.
• Set the right access level (private, collaborators, public) and choose whether copying your text is allowed.
• Choose a theme for your audience to set the mood. Readers have the option to change themes, toggle accessible fonts, and more.
• You can also hide spoilers in Reader comments with formatting!

Learn all about sharing Reader links here!

.docx Import and Export

Moving your work from GDocs & Word just got that much easier. Import your your docs quickly (one by one, or a bunch at once!), or export your docs to .docx whenever you want.
Importing your work just got a whole lot easier.

Document zoom

From 50% to 200%, get the right dimensions with independent browser & document zoom settings.
Zoom in on desktop or mobile!

Emoji picker

Type your :favorite emoji: and see it materialize, or choose from the emoji menu. You can insert an emoji in Reader comments using the icon—or, in the editor, just type a colon followed by the first letters of your favorite emoji.
All the emojis!

Other improvements

• Snippets now default to your current Ellipsus theme. Share away!
• You can hide text highlights in the Reader via the display settings (where theme editing lives).
• Navigating around the app got faster with rendering upgrades.
• Document & draft info has moved to the document card (it was formerly in the right-hand toolbar).
• We've fixed a number of bugs around sync and sync-warning banners.
• We're now posting Ellipsus tutorials & writing content on YouTube Shorts.
  Smash that subscribe >

Meanwhile, on the blog...

We took a hard look and deep-dove into the world Google built: the (lack of) privacy, (mis)use of our data, and the money that flows out of their surveillance machine.
Check out the full series!

Ellipsus exists, grows, and thrives thanks to the prolific, passionate, super creative, and slightly obsessive writers and readers (like you!)—proof that human creativity isn’t going anywhere.
So keep writing, keep reading—the LLM-industrial-complex doesn’t stand a chance.
Happy writing,
The Ellipsus team

Want to connect with a like-minded community and get the latest news on Ellipsus? Join our Discord to follow announcements and share your feedback.

Original source

New ways to collaborate, a batch of shiny new themes, fonts, and performance improvements…

There’s a lot to check out in Ellipsus this month (and a lot to look forward to).

September was a
super
busy month for Ellipsus—two brand-new collaboration roles, eight delightful themes, ten new fonts, and a fresh round of polish to keep Ellipsus running smoother than ever.

Let’s go!

Collaborate your way

Writing together isn’t one-size-fits-all, so we’ve expanded the ways you can invite others into your docs with
two new permissions roles.

Can Comment

Need beta feedback without direct edits? The
Can Comment
role lets collaborators do just that. They can create drafts to comment, reply to comments, and share all their
Valued

Opinions™ —but they
can’t
edit or merge your text. It’s perfect for reviewers, editors, and that one friend who always has hot takes.

Can View

Sometimes you just want to hand someone your whole project to read through. That’s where
Can View
comes in. With this role, collaborators can read your main doc
and
all its drafts—but they
can’t
leave comments, make drafts, edits, or merge your text. It’s a great fit if you’re using drafts to structure your project as chapters, of just want to share everything in one go.

Together with
Owner
,
Can Merge
, and
Can Edit
, Ellipsus now has a role for every flavor of collab. Keep on the lookout for more later this year!

A big batch ‘o themes

We added eight more ways to set the mood in your
favorite
writing space:

• Lilium: a midnight garden 🥀
• Love Letter: a secret romance 💌
• Cinéma Vérité: greyscale shadowplay 🌫️
• Cotton Candy: dreamcore pastels 🍬
• Afterglow: sunset fading to dusk 🌅
• Custard: cozy butter yellow 🧈
• Radioactive: electric alien green ☢️
• Petal: soft romantic florals 🌸

We’re particularly obsessed with this batch (our personal faves? a toss-up between Lilium and Afterglow).

Theme Thursday drops every two weeks to keep your WIPs fresh. Next up: cozy autumn palettes with just the right amount of witchy energy. ☕️🎃🍁🔮

Style, serif, sans—oh my

And for
Font Friday
, we added
10 brand-new fonts
, each with its own personality: clean and minimalist, soft and romantic, futuristic, cute and a
bit
weird, even a redacted style (perfect for looking mysterious while you type on the train).

Support changes (for the better)

We gave our
Help Center
a little glow-up. It’s now easier to search, with clearer categories and more up-to-date guides on how to use everything from outlines to roles, and updated troubleshooting sections. If you're ever lost in the sauce, it’s a great first stop.

We’ve also made a few behind-the-scenes upgrades to make your support experience smoother:

• We switched providers for in-app support.
• You’ll now see a support form in the
  left sidebar
  .
• You’ll still get the same fast replies, and responses will land directly in your email.

Less lag, more flow

Been working in an epically-sized doc and noticing lag? That should be a thing of the past. We wrapped a lag improvement initiative that makes typing, editing, and scrolling much smoother—even in massive projects. (Time to import that 300k word longfic!)

And that’s a wrap for September! Write what you want, share how you want… and get ready for more fun (and spooky 👻) updates in October.

Want to connect with a like-minded community and get the latest news on Ellipsus?
Join our Discord
to follow announcements and share your feedback.

Original source

October and November updates

October and November are big months for writers—and for the people building tools for writers! So we have a ton of updates to share: improvements small, large, and extra-large.

October and November are big months for writers—and for the people building tools for writers! We shipped a whole slew of features and updates, from how you share your work, to how collaboration happens on small (but mighty) screens, to how the page looks when it matches the voice in your head.

Plus new themes, new templates, fresh blog posts, and a few long-overdue delights… it’s been a lot (in the best way).

Invite by link

There’s a new way to share your docs: no email invites required. You can now generate a shareable link with a specific permissions role attached (Can View, Can Comment, Can Edit, and more), and share it anywhere.

Here’s how it works:

• Open the Collaborators panel in your doc
• Click + Invite new
• Choose the role you want anyone with the link to have
• Select Invite by link to generate your custom link

Want to share different access levels with different groups? You can create as many links as you’d like—one for readers, one for beta readers, one for your co-author who only edits at 4AM… a whole flock of hungry editors eager to tear into your draft, or a coven of readers haunting your prose—go forth, and blast your work into the void.

And if you don’t want your WIP links to float around forever, you can set them to expire after a certain amount of time. Visit the Link settings in the Share by link section of the Collaborators panel to set an expiration date.

A better way to collab on mobile

Writing together happens everywhere: on the train, waiting in line for coffee, procrastinating in class, or half-awake on the couch with your phone balanced precariously on a pillow...

So we rebuilt comments on mobile from the ground up to make collaborating a lot easier.

On mobile, comments now open in a bottom sheet to quickly move through threads without losing your place in the doc. You can flip through comments easily using the arrows at the top of the sheet.

If you want the bigger picture, View all comments pulls every thread into a single scrollable list. You can also filter by collaborator when you’re hunting for specific feedback (on mobile or desktop).

Replies got a rethink too. They now open full-screen, with the input bar anchored at the bottom, so you can read through the conversation while you’re typing.

Sometimes words fail (so we added GIFs)

When the ship is shipping so hard that only a primal scream will do… there’s a GIF for that.

Comments now support GIFs via Giphy. Drop one directly into a comment or reply, with or without text. Celebrate, panic, commiserate, or communicate an entire emotional arc in a few seconds. Cue chaos (affectionate).

Eight new themes

October and November brought not one, but two theme drops!

Cozy, witchy, autumnal

For Spooky Season, we brought a little warmth and magic to your dash:

• 🍁 Maple : golden-hour glow and candy corn
• 🎃 Pumpkin Spice : rainy windowpanes and seriously thick novels
• 🔮 Wicked Fog : violet haze, spellcraft, cauldron smoke
• ☕️ Fig Espresso : dark roast and scheming by candlelight

A little nostalgia, plus a future worth building

It’s no secret that we all miss the Old Internet (and the weird, human, stubborn corners of it that still exist). So we shipped four visions of the future we were promised… and the one we’re still writing ourselves:

• 🫧 Aero : the dream of the Good Internet is alive in Ellipsus
• 💾 Retrograde : a/s/l?? Our boi Clippy lives forever in our hearts
• ❤️ Kudos : we’ve seen some incredible AO3 skins made from Ellipsus themes, so… why not return the favor. Iykyk.
• ⛓️‍💥 Wasteland : dystopian blues, but this time… we’re gonna make it 🤝

As always, themes are about making your space feel like you —we’re always taking suggestions over on our Discord !

Granular styling, finally

One of the most requested features since Ellipsus began, and it’s finally here: granular styling.

You can now format individual words, phrases, punctuation, or paragraphs with precision. Fonts, sizes, spacing, line height, letter and word spacing, emphasis, color—each can be applied exactly where you want it, without forcing changes across your entire document. Read all about it over on the Help Center!

Styling also carries over into Snippets, so your voice stays consistent when you share it.

Templates, blog posts, and big ol' projects

For anyone tackling long-form projects, we wanted to meet those goals head-on, so we shipped three new in-tool templates for planning your monster drafts:

• Project Compass
• Backstory Planning
• Creative Goals

You can read more about them over on the blog.

Also the blog, we also explored what it means to sustain writing and plan for the long haul, with pieces like Getting into the Space of Writing and The Art of Long-Form: How to Write Everyday. And we took a hard look at The End of NaNo (as We Know It) —NaNoWriMo’s public endorsement of generative AI, the fallout that followed… and what comes next for the community.

Want to connect with a like-minded community and get the latest news on Ellipsus? Join our Discord to follow announcements and share your feedback.

Original source

From themes to highlights to passwords, July’s features help make your writing space feel a little more like you.

It’s been a sec! We’ve been building, tweaking, theming… fresh ways to personalize your space, smoother logins, and a flood of new writers showing up (hello, hi!).

The team’s been on fire—shipping features faster than chapters in a crackfic AU. Let’s get into it. 🔥

Log in faster, write sooner

A small but mighty change: you can now set a password to log in to Ellipsus across all your devices.

That means no more cursing your inbox every time you have to copy/paste a one-time code. We're keeping legacy code login for now—but if you want a faster way to get in and get writing, head to your Settings and set a password.

This update was made possible by our big migration to a new authentication provider—fast-tracked after a surge in sign-ups led to unexpected rate limits (aka the internet’s classic hug of death ). We’re now better equipped to scale (sky’s the limit!) without making you wait to log in.

And in the spirit of upgrades, you can now change your avatar directly in Ellipsus.

For waaaaay too long, we were stuck with Gravatar as our out-of-the-box option—but between its inaccessibility and pro-AI stance, we were more than ready to part ways.

Now, you can personalize your profile picture with any image you like, and swap whenever the mood strikes. Just head to Settings, hover over your current avatar, click the ✏️ icon, and upload something that feels a bit more you.

Set the scene with themes

A big batch of new themes dropped in July—with many more on the way.

You can now deck out out your writing space to match your mood, or genre, or whatever WIP or character you’re currently channeling. Switch things up instantly with the theme picker at the bottom left of your screen.

New looks for your next chapter:

• Dark Pride: a little late-night rebellion, the dark side of our Pride theme
• Roseglow: a soft, candle-lit romantic blush
• Resistance: an overgrown dystopia, but make it cozy
• Jazzy Blue: rainy-day melancholia with a dash of noir
• Mermaid: an iridescent shell gradient with a bit of sparkle
• Leatherbound and Marble: dark and light academia—sequestered in the stacks, or wandering a quiet museum
• Red Velvet: vampiric horror with a bit of decadence
• Labyrinth: deep, dark fantasy with glowing accents, for an enchanted witchy vibe

And the best part: when you share your work, you can set a default theme so readers stay immersed in your carefully crafted vibe. (Once they open the link, they can still change the theme to fit their preferences.) You can even have your Snippets match automatically.

And watch out for #ThemeThursday bi-weekly drops!

If you’re yearning for a particular aesthetic (cyberpunk detective agency? Deep space horror? Faded medieval tapestry? A baroque opera house at midnight? A haunted old-school PC desktop???)... share your suggestions on our Discord!

Make it pop, or pastel

You asked (nicely... and persistently 🫣) and we listened. Long requested, and finally delivered: Highlighter!

Now you can revise, organize, color-code, mark up important lines, and spotlight that one paragraph you’re not quite ready to delete. Whatever works for your brain.

Adhesively yours, Ellipsus

We jumped on the merch train this summer (with half our our proceeds donated for Pride ). You can now snag a whole slew of stickers to support your favorite local writing tool, share that you’re absolutely feral for creativity, and let the world know you write like a human.

Our #1 bestseller? You guessed it: FCK GPT.

Small fixes, big difference

We also cleaned up a few corners (so your writing brain doesn’t have to). Your cursor now remembers its last position across documents and drafts, so you can pick up right where you left off. And spell check just got smarter—common words like orca, maths, and thrusters should no longer get flagged as typos.

We’re feeling the love

In the past month, the number of writers using Ellipsus has more than doubled.

That’s wild. That’s incredible! And that’s you: our fiercely creative, perpetually-typing community.

We want to keep that momentum (and that love) going strong. Behind the scenes, our engineering team has been hard at work making sure Ellipsus stays in sync, especially as so many new voices join us. That effort’s already paying off, and we’ve got even more in the works.

We’re building Ellipsus to be a space that holds your work with care—where you feel safe, supported, and (hopefully!) creatively unstoppable. And some pretty big things are just around the corner.

Stay tuned… and as always, happy writing!

Want to connect with a like-minded community and get the latest news on Ellipsus? Join our Discord to follow announcements and share your feedback.

Original source

Add images, flesh out your fic, and decode those oh-so-cryptic doc titles. This month we delivered several updates to help bring your projects to life.

Add images to your docs

Research, reference images, not-so-SFW fan art—images can be just as crucial to the writing process as the words themselves, and now they can all live in Ellipsus.

Upload, drag ‘em, paste ‘em in—it’s easy to add images to your drafts and docs, as long as they’re the right file format (JPG, JEPG, PNG, or SVG) and size (512KB). Plus there’s no limit on the number of images you (or your collaborators) can add. Learn more about image support in the help center.

One thing to note is that—PDFs aside—your images don’t travel outside your docs; i.e., no hotlinking. There are two reasons for this:

• Preventing abuse / managing costs: We want to avoid people treating Ellipsus as a pure image-storing service. It's not just a financial consideration—it could open us up to other problems if bad actors start using Ellipsus with the sole intention to distribute image links.
• Limiting who can see and share your images: We're honored that you trust us with your writing, and we want you to feel the same way about images. In addition to being deliberate about where they're stored (Ireland), we're also deliberate about how they can be shared. Image links are protected by default, so anyone you’re not collaborating with who tries to open an image link will be redirected to a 404 page.

Have fun, and please don’t melt our servers!

Plan your fic with 3 new templates

Our latest batch of templates is dedicated to fan writers—bring your blorbos to life (or kill them, or resurrect them from the dead …) and then give them all the emotional depth and drama they deserve!

• Fandom ship template: Map your ship’s emotional beats, from the first glance to final climax, emotional or otherwise.
• Canon divergence template: Break the timeline, rewrite your tools, and give your faves a happy (or not-so-happy) ending.
• AU planning template: Modernize, magicalize, or make ‘em rival antique shop owners.

Head to your dashboard to explore all 13 templates. What templates should we work on next? Let us know over our our ideas board!

Manage your dashboard

Many of you are contending with a growing number of Ellipsus docs! We’re adding two small improvements that emphasize the “p” in WIP.

Doc sorting is smarter

We’ve updated the logic for document timestamps to provide a more accurate overview of recent activity. In addition to editing main, all of these actions will be reflected in your doc’s last edited timestamp:

• Renaming or adding a description
• Creating, editing, or duplicating a draft
• Adding or removing a collaborator

Decode docs with descriptions

That clever title you hammered out at 3 AM? It’s a little less clear in the harsh light of day. Now, just like folders, documents can have descriptions. Descriptions are visible to any invited collaborators, which offers a little more flexibility in how you use them. For instance:

• Summarize your story or chapter (the florals in spring of use cases, yes)
• Share the latest status (e.g., Looking for input on X, Y, Z; working through a specific scene, etc.)
• Note the relationship between docs in a folder

Syncing and growing pains

Does it feel like you’ve been seeing "Saved locally” more often? It’s not just you. At peak times, our synchronizers have been straining to keep up with the amount of people writing between 9 PM and 1 PM UTC. One the one hand, it’s one of those “good” problems to have—enough people are using Ellipsus that we need to scale our systems. But nothing about it feels good if loading lags, your collaborator’s changes don’t show up right away, and an ominous yellow dot looms over your writing. Actually, it kind of sucks.

We’ve been working on the problem from several angles—everything from scaling up our machines to handle the increased traffic to finer-grained performance optimizations in the code. There’s still a lot of work ahead of us, but we hope you’re starting to notice a difference.

Want to connect with a like-minded community and get the latest news on Ellipsus? Join our Discord to follow announcements and share your feedback.

Original source

WHAT'S NEW

New in Ellipsus: March 2025

Sometimes, the most challenging part of writing is just getting started. Living in this world is daunting enough. But building a new one? From scratch?

This month’s updates are here to make it easier to go from blank page to first draft.

WRITTEN BY

Kate Donahue

PUBLISH DATE

04/04/2025

Plan your story with templates

Developing a story starts with asking the right questions.
We’ve added 10 templates to help you define your next story’s world, characters, and plot points. Explore templates for:

• Assembling character sheets
• Planning character arcs
• Identifying your characters’ emotional wounds
• Outlining character relationships
• Defining conflicts, stakes, and tension
• Building scenes
• Crafting a story opener
• Planning your story
• Exploring themes and symbolism
• World-building

You can work with these templates directly in Ellipsus—open the dashboard, click New, and then select From template.

What templates would you like to see next? Let us know over on our ideas board.

Set the mood with 10 new fonts

We’re continuing to enrich the editor with additional fonts. (Shout out to everyone who shared excellent suggestions on our ideas board—keep them comin’!)

In March, we added 10 new fonts. Our latest batch includes a playful, sans serif option (Balsamiq Sans), two vintage-inspired serif fonts (IM FELL English, Spectral, Newsreader), and a few handwritten ones (Lugrasimo, Oooh Baby). (Did we choose Oooh Baby for its name? Perhaps.)

Check spelling in four new languages

Ellipsus has writers in nearly 160 countries. That’s a lot of (potential) typos across a lot of languages! (JK we’re sure you’re all perfect.)

We’ve added Czech, Irish, Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk), and Swedish to our supported spell-check languages.

How do we choose which languages to support? It’s a mix of scrying, reviewing anonymized visitor data to see where writers are (generally) located, and keeping our eyes open for specific requests. When all three point to the same outcome— and we’re able to spot a compatible open-source dictionary—well, that’s when the spell check magic happens, baby. So, if you’d like to see another language in Ellipsus, let us know and we’ll look into it!

Want to connect with a like-minded community and get the latest news on Ellipsus? Join our Discord to follow announcements and share your feedback.

Original source

WRITTEN BY
Kate Donahue

PUBLISH DATE
03/03/2025

Stay motivated with a built-in timer

Some days, it’s easy to do everything but write. But if you can will yourself to park those cheeks and put fingers to keys for just five minutes, you might amaze yourself. Five minutes can become twenty, and one stilted sentence can become a vibrant, fleshed-out scene.

We want to help you build a consistent writing habit, so we’ve added a customizable timer directly in the editor. Just set a time (between one minute and a full day*) and start writing. At the end of the session, Dottie**—Sussy’s cheerful counterpart—will pop in to let you know how many words were added or removed during your session.

*We don’t advise writing for 24 hours straight. Sleep is essential!

**Stay tuned for an official lore drop for Dottie and Sussy.

Write in style with 15 new fonts

Speaking of productivity … the right font can also get those creative juices flowing. To help with that spark, we added 15 new fonts that offer a range of options—from literary to handwritten, from highly legible to elvish-adjacent. You can check out the full list in our help center or explore them during your next editing session.

Let us know what fonts you want to see next!

Duplicate documents and drafts

This update is simple but powerful. Now, you—and only you—can duplicate your documents and all their drafts. (Version history, comments, chat messages, and collaborators won’t carry over.) Duplication unlocks a few potential use cases:

• Share duplicates of a story with different audiences, ensuring feedback from each group is kept separate.
• Organize digital backups of completed works in an archive folder. (Multiple backups FTW!)
• Create makeshift templates to start a new story or support an ongoing project.

In need of a few good templates to spark inspiration? Watch this space …

Escape the enshittification cycle

Many of the products and communities we once loved (or were at least tacitly okay with) are becoming actively worse and, in some cases, downright hostile toward creative freedom. In February, we published our thoughts on the enshittification of creative spaces (and how we plan to be different!).

It’s also good to remember that, while it sometimes feels like you can’t escape the gaping maw of big tech, you do have options. There are dozens of alternatives out there for email, storage, web browsers, and more. (Insert shameless plug for Ellipsus here!) We put together a not-comprehensive-but-hopefully-still-helpful list for those of you looking to de-Google your personal life.

Want to connect with a like-minded community and get the latest news on Ellipsus? Join our Discord to follow announcements and share your feedback.

Original source

Pick your preferred theme

Getting a writing project going involves setting the right vibe. To help you get those creative juices flowing, we’re adding three new themes to Ellipsus.

• Sepia: A cozy palette of beiges and browns reminiscent of parchment.
• Nature: A palette of deep greens, like strolling through a tranquil forest.
• Ultra dark: An ink-black backdrop for your work.

Themes are stored on each browser / device where you use Ellipsus, so you can set one theme for your laptop and one for your phone.
What’s the future of themes? Think more palettes and more granularity (e.g., setting Nature for your fantasy story and using Ultra dark for something horror-related).
What theme would you like to see next?
Add your ideas here.

Meet your new dashboard

We’ve given the dashboard a much-needed glow-up.
On desktop, you’ll see a (collapsible) sidebar, where you can access work you’ve created, docs shared with you, your settings, and support materials. On mobile, you’ll see a bottom bar that puts key action within thumb’s reach.
Beyond looking much cleaner, this change sets the stage for future improvements like list view (!!!), favoriting, and more.
Watch this space.

Make your snippets pop

It warms our hearts to see your snippets when we’re lurking around the web. But they were missing something very important—the ability to shape visual emphasis. Italics can shift the meaning of sentence, or express a character's inner thoughts; bold text can heighten tensions in a heated argument… we want your words to come across loud and clear.

Now, text colors, bold, italics, underlines, and strikethroughs are supported in snippets, preserving all emphasis, no matter where your writing is shared.

Move faster with UX improvements

In some ways, Ellipsus will always feel different to tools like Google Docs and Scrivener. But some patterns bear repeating, especially when they help make writing, sharing, and collaborating easier. In January, we shipped a few small updates that should make Ellipsus a little more pleasant to use.

• New drafts can be created from a plus sign in the left-hand panel of the editor.
• Comment annotations have a different color than text selections.
• Document links can be copied by right-clicking on dashboard cards.

Writing in the age of erasure

We’re not going to mince words: The world is suddenly a much scarier place than it was just months ago. Project 2025 is no longer a vague nightmare—it’s more tangible each day—and fascism seems suddenly back in vogue.

In times when marginalized voices are threatened, it’s more important than ever to keep writing. Our co-founder Rex wrote a post summarizing the current state of affairs. I’ll leave you with a few words from him.

Empathy is one of the most valuable resources we have, and in the darkest times writers armed with nothing but words have exposed injustice, changed culture, and kept their communities connected.

Rex Mizrach

Original source

A look back at 2024

2024 was a year full of surprises! Before we close this chapter, we’re presenting a few more goodies.

It’s hard to believe how much Ellipsus has changed over the past year. In just 12 months—and with a team of seven—we shipped more than 20 major features. (If you’re feeling nostalgic, check out all our releases here.)

And our raison d'être is more relevant than ever. Between the ongoing developments and news around generative AI, the potential consequences of the US election, and the general what-the-fuck-is-happening of it all, writers are (rightfully) concerned about having the freedom to write what they want, where they want, without worrying about censorship, data loss, or persecution. We’re humbled by your trust in our product and will continue to do right by you.

Without further ado, our final updates for the year!

Create and edit AO3 chapters

In October, we introduced the first version of our AO3 export, which enabled writers to copy their docs as HTML and create new works.

Now, we’re making it possible to generate a list of your existing works so you can create new chapters or edit existing ones.

We did a deep dive into this feature in a recent blog post so that you can see it in action.

Share snippets of your WIPs

Earlier this year, we started noticing screenshots of Ellipsus docs in the wild. So we built snippet-sharing directly into Ellipsus. Now, you can select up to 150 words and create a shareable, stylized image fit for any platform. Choose between seven background colors and three sizes (landscape, portrait, and square), then download the image to your device and share it anywhere.

Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Get tips on collaborative writing

We surveyed 350+ writers a few months ago to learn more about their collaborative behaviors, including common challenges and tips for overcoming them.

John and Rex have been recapping the findings over on the blog. Check them out if you’re looking for ways to forge and nurture better writing relationships.

• Getting Started with Collaborative Writing
• Working with Co-Authors
• Working with Beta Readers and Editors

Stay tuned for their final article on the importance of writing communities.

Connect with other writers

Speaking of communities!

At the start of 2024, our Discord had about 100 members. We’re closing out the year with just under 1,500. Our server has grown into a place where people share and get actionable feedback on their writing, where writers find beta readers and collaborators, and where people can connect over their myriad interests.

In December, we tackled some much-needed improvements, adding roles, dedicated writer-finder channels, and a sprint bot. If you want to expand your writing community in 2025, come check it out for yourself!

Join the Discord

Original source

Kick off Pride with Ellipsus

As a queer-founded company building a space for our
very, very gay
creative community, we know how much June matters. Especially in a year where words and books are being banned,
Pride Month is getting yeeted from calendars
(real brave, Google), and
it’s becoming clear
that corporate “allies” were only in it for the likes, shares, and positive PR.

We have (lots) more to say on the topic. But to kick things off, we’ve shipped a few changes to help you celebrate Pride in style.

Celebrate with a new theme

We’re making Ellipsus a little more colorful with a new theme: Pride. Developed under the code name Gay AF, this versatile (
ahem
) theme is perfect when light is too bright and sepia is too warm.

… and a new snippet background

Keep those pastel vibes going when you share your writing with a new Pride-themed background.

"Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing."

Since lots of you have already asked: These changes are permanent. Because celebrating queer voices shouldn't be limited to one month.

Stay tuned for more thoughts and goodies (Dark Pride theme, anyone?) to drop in June.

Let your links do the talking

Last month,
we added document descriptions
to give a bit more context to those otherwise impenetrable (
ahem)
doc titles. Now, we’re making that metadata work a bit harder.

When you enable view-only links, we’ll use your document description in the link preview. This should work in places like Discord, Bluesky, Tumblr (and also Slack, for the minority of you using Ellipsus for your SFW writing). Hopefully this makes the collaboration you’re doing
outside
of Ellipsus even smoother!

Vanquish more typos

We’ve seen the posts, reblogs, and skeets
(ahem
)—we fear our spell check is flirting with memedom.

First, some context! We rely on hand-curated, open-source dictionaries to power our spell check—the same ones that form the basis of Libre Office’s offering. The downside is that they’re not exhaustive. So occasionally there would be some obvious misses like “orca” just … not being recognized as a real word.

We’re switching to expanded versions of these dictionaries, essentially doubling our coverage across American, Australian, British, and Canadian English.

Our work with spell check is nowhere near complete—we suppose you could call it our white whale—but should hopefully reduce some of the linguistic gaslighting we’ve been responsible for. (Yes, we know orcas are actually dolphins, not whales. But jokes!)

Sync and storage updates

“Safety” is a core part of our product philosophy. To us, it means that writers can trust Ellipsus to store their writing, make it available whenever (and wherever) they need it, and keep it out of the hands of bad actors, LLMs, and those who want to curtail creative freedoms.

In May, we took a closer look at performance aspect of safety, to make sure that your changes are always saved, synced, and stored.

Syncing is more stable

Our
synchronizer was struggling
with the number of people writing in Ellipsus during peak hours. Our engineering team did a holistic evaluation of the problems we were facing—everything from individual lines of code to the vendors we rely on for syncing—and worked to improve this critical part of our product.

Over the past month, we fixed a few nasty bugs and optimized the synchronization process, reducing our servers’ memory and CPU usage during peak traffic hours. The result? We’ve reduced manual reconnections (i.e., via the “Saved locally” pop-up in the editor) by 72%.

Version history takes up less space

During our performance tune-up, we also took a closer look at improving version history. Our version history takes a snapshot of a draft approximately every two seconds(!) during a writing session. So prolific writers have equally prolific version histories. And due to some inefficiencies in our storage processes, the git repos hosting those version histories were becoming absolute chonkers, sometimes reaching up to 6GB. The end result? Some writers couldn’t access their history unless we manually cleaned up the storage. Bummer.

We’ve cleaned up some of our legacy code and changed how we fetch past versions (pagination FTW), so getting into a stuck state should be
very, very
rare. (If you
do
run into this, get in touch and we’ll get you unstuck in a jiffy.)

With these changes, version history will take up to 90% less storage space. So in addition to a faster experience for you, we should be able to save some extra coin each month—a real win-win!

Want to connect with a like-minded community
and
get the latest news on Ellipsus?
Join our Discord
to follow announcements and share your feedback.

Original source

Ellipsus + AO3

Archive of Our Own, the proverbial phoenix that rose from the ashes of the LiveJournal and
FanFiction.net
purges, is now an institution all its own. And over the years we’ve been contributors, lurkers, and fierce admirers. After all, unapologetic creativity is a shared ethos.

Many of our writers consider AO3 a home—if not
the home
—for their work. So we wanted to make sharing that work simpler.
Back in October, we released a streamlined way to copy HTML out of Ellipsus and paste it into AO3. And writers were …
very
excited about it.

You either die an anonymous product manager, or live long enough to become a deep-fried PNG.

We can always count on our community to encourage us to continue iterating. Within a few hours of the release we received this note:

Oh I just tried it and its incredible, the only thing is, it redirects to ao3 after copying and starts a new ao3 fic but sometimes (most of the times for me at least) its an update to a fic not a new fic

Fair! Of course our writers aren’t limiting their creativity to one-shots. They’re also tending to multi-chapter works (and massive ones, at that). We wanted to help those writers too.

What is Archive of Our Own?

For the uninitiated:
Archive of Our Own
is a project managed by the
Organization for Transformative Works
. The non-profit, non-commercial archive hosts transformative fanworks, in particular, fan fiction. The mainstream might think AO3 is niche, but with
millions
of page views per day it’s anything but. Occasionally, the fan works hosted there even bleed into the public consciousness—just this week creator
DRHPaints
was name-dropped on podcast
Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.

Why build a better way to post to AO3?

Across Reddit, Tumblr, and other social platforms,
what’s the best way to post to AO3
is a recurring topic.

Major pain points include preserving spacing and text decorations (like bold and italics) when copying and pasting, preventing random spaces from being inserted, and the general annoyance of having to clean up HTML tags. (And if you’re trying to post from your phone??? 💀💀💀)

We’re certainly not the first to answer the call.
AO3 officially endorses a script for Google Docs
, and independent developers have created tools like
AOYeet
.

But as more writers
look for alternatives to Google Docs and Microsoft Word
, they’ll need new ways to format their AO3 writing—ideally without having to juggle multiple tools.

Create new works, add new chapters

Today, we’re expanding our support for sharing to AO3. In addition to posting new works, you can now manage and update existing ones. You’ll still need to manage titles, creators, and metadata directly in AO3—but generating nicely formatted HTML for your main text is reduced to a few clicks.

Post new works

Make sure you’re logged in to AO3 in the current browser. Then open
Share and export
and click
Export to AO3
to open a sharing modal. From there, you can select

• New work
  to copy the current doc or draft as HTML—we’ll automatically open AO3 in a new tab so you can paste your text and prepare your work for posting.

View existing works

After clicking
Export to AO3
, you can enter your username to generate a list of your current works on AO3. Your username will be saved to the current browser—a big time-saver if there are multiple Ellipsus docs meant for AO3. (We use AO3’s publicly available URLs to pull in works and chapters-
you’ll only be able to post to AO3 if you’re logged into your linked account.
)

By default, this list will be ordered by your most recent works. (But search is coming soon!)

After finding the work you want to update, you can choose to post a new chapter or edit an existing one. Select an option and Ellipsus will copy your current draft or doc to your clipboard and open AO3 in a new tab.

Help shape what’s next

In 2025, we plan to extend our export options and even dip our digital toes into integrations. So, what do you want to see?
Add your ideas to our feedback board
or
join our Discord
to share your thoughts with the team!

Original source

WHAT'S NEW

New in Ellipsus: Q3 2024

New
in
Ellipsus:
Q3
2024

Folders, notifications, search, and more. Collaborating on large-scale projects in Ellipsus is easier than ever.
Since July, we've been focused on making it easier to navigate your workspace, manage large-scale projects, and collaborate with other writers.

WRITTEN BY

Kate Donahue

PUBLISH DATE

19/08/2024

SHARE THIS ARTICLE

Better project organization

Like any beta product, Ellipsus has had its share of (manageable) scaling issues. The most pressing one is that people are writing a lot in Ellipsus, and typically working on very long works. While this is undoubtedly A Good Problem, it does create some frustrations around finding, loading, and sharing your work.

Our latest features make it easier to work on any type of project in Ellipsus.

• Store documents in folders (and subfolders)

  • Whether you're focused on serialized works published to AO3 or a single book-length piece supplemented by lots of research, folders can make your work much more manageable. (Not to be hyperbolic, but in the week it's been live for the Ellipsus team it's changed my entire life.)
  • Any folders you create can contain an unlimited number of documents and subfolders, so you can set them up in any way that works for you, such as:
  • Separating research, outlines, and world-building materials from the documents that will store your final work.
  • Storing your personal templates, like character sheets and world-building sheets.
  • Representing different stages in your workflow, like drafting, beta reading, and published.
  • Archiving older documents, or ideas you want to (eventually!) circle back to.

• You can learn more about creating folders and moving your documents here.

• Search document names

  • The other challenge that comes from having so many documents is trying to find them without tons of clicking and scrolling.
  • At the start of July, we added the ability to search for document names. Using the search field at the top of your dashboard, you can search all your documents (and folders!) as well as documents shared with you.

• More options for sharing and collaboration

  • Whenever we make a change in Ellipsus, we ask ourselves: Does this keep our writers in control? Whether it's styling text or managing drafts, we want writers to feel like they have the final say over their work—and that's even more important when it comes to how work is shared with others.

  • Choose whether links are private or view-only

    • When we first entered beta, Ellipsus documents could be viewed by anyone with the link. Now, all links are private by default, giving you an extra level of security before choosing to share your work.
    • If you want to enable view-only sharing, you can open Share and export to adjust your settings. Even with view-only access, links only go where you (and your collaborators) share them, and they're never indexed by search engines.

• Stay on top of updates in the notification center

  • If you're collaborating across multiple documents, it can be difficult to stay on top of new activity without sneaking back to your email inbox.
  • Now, you keep tabs on what's happening right from our notification center, available from your dashboard and editor. Currently, we send notifications about new document invites, comments, and replies. With this change, you also have more control over which notifications (if any) are sent as emails.

• You can learn more about Ellipsus notifications here.

• Plus other updates, improvements, and fixes

  • We shipped a new website! Now, if you recommend Ellipsus to a friend, they'll be able to see a preview before they sign up. (Plus, we scrapped our scribbly Quentin font, so all text on the site is more legible.)
  • Writing on smaller laptops or tablets wasn't always so pleasant. Now, the editor layout is more responsive, and the right-hand panel should never cover your text.
  • Sometimes the editor would randomly reload while writing, moving your cursor to a new position. Irritating, we know. Happily, the dreaded Whoopsie Doodle (iykyk) has been vanquished.
  • Debugging issues is a little bit easier. Now you can download your console logs and stored data from the settings page and send them to us via in-app chat.

Want to hear about the latest updates as they happen?
Join our Discord to follow announcements and share your feedback.

Original source

Every three months, we take a look back at the features and improvements we added to Ellipsus.
This quarter, we shipped some of our top feature requests, so you can tally up your words, take care of typos, traverse longer documents, and more.

Write and edit with ease

We've always been proud of the how Ellipsus supports your first few drafts—it's
simple
to get your ideas into the tool. But refining longer works was another story. So this past quarter, we focused on making it easier to view progress and put the finishing touches on your docs.

View word count while you write

Whether you have a daily writing goal, do your writing in sprints, or just like to quantify your progress, having your word count handy can be incredibly helpful.
Originally, word count was tucked under
Document info
in the right-hand panel—so it was
there
, but easy to overlook. After lots and lots of feedback and feature requests, we've moved it to the top of the editor so you can see
numbers go brrr
while you type. Click on the word count to reveal detailed information like character count and reading time. As a bonus, when you highlight a section of text, you'll see its word count up top.
If seeing your word count makes you anxious, you can scroll down slightly, and the top navigation will hide. When you're ready to reveal it again, scroll up slightly.

Check your spelling—when you're ready

One thing that's become clear via interacting with our community on Discord is that there is a distinction between writing and editing. (Obvious in retrospect. But as a self-proclaimed "person-who-writes-but-not-a-writer" I'm often guilty of smooshing the two phases together.) So when they're working to bang out key plot points and expand on dialogue, the last thing they want to see are distracting squiggles.
In Ellipsus, spell check is
off
by default. When you're ready to edit, you can switch it on and scan for typos in your document. Right now, it supports 10 languages: four variations of English, then German, Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, and Polish. (If you need another language, reach out at [email protected] and let us know!)

Manage hyperlinks with less fuss

Previously, you could paste a URL onto a selection of text to hyperlink it, but it was impossible to see what was linked. Now, there's a bit more UI to support the experience. You can add a link (and title text) via the right-hand panel and select a link in your text to view, edit, or remove the URL.

Navigate docs quickly

Ellipsus is minimal by design. We want the UI to mostly stay out of the way so that you can focus on your ideas. Our next batch of updates are designed to make it easier to get around your document
and
the editor, whether you're a point-and-clicker or a keyboard maestro.

Stay organized with outlines

Ellipsus writers write
a lot
. (Like pushing-the-limits-of-our-tech-stack a lot.) And navigating a 100K-word document in a browser window (let alone via a smartphone) in Ellipsus was frankly starting to become a real pain in the ass.
Now, any headers in your document will automatically appear in outline mode so that you can click to jump to any point in your document. In addition to flexibility in navigation, it also offers an at-a-glance view of your document's structure, so you can check for consistency and balance.

Outline mode is
also
visible in view-only links, so that your readers can easily browse your document. And if you want to get their input on a specific chapter or section, just right-click on the heading in outline mode to copy and share a direct link.

Enjoy a slimmed-down sidebar

We’ve refreshed the right-hand sidebar to create more logical groupings. So functions related to formatting and navigating your document are up top, functions related to collaborating and sharing your document are in the center, and your doc info and support options are at the bottom.
Missing focus mode? You'll find your favorite espresso icon at the top of your editor, right next to your word count.

Get to know our keyboard shortcuts

We’re making our available shortcuts more visible. Click the game controller icon in the left-hand panel to reveal all the shortcuts we support for editing, formatting, collaborating, and more.

Stay on top of syncing

One of the things writers love most about Ellipsus is that they can pick up on their writing wherever they are, no matter the device. But important information about the syncing status was hidden under
Document info
, so a writer wouldn't always know if work stopped syncing changes to the server.
We've moved your connection status to the left-hand panel of the editor, right next to the dashboard icon. Click on it to see the current status as well as when content was last edited and synced.

As summer (finally) descends upon Europe, the Ellipsus team has one thing on our minds (aside from where to find the best Hugo Spritz): getting ready for our public launch. Before we cut that metaphorical ribbon, there's lots to do and lots for you to look forward to, like folders, better notifications, and improvements to merging.

Join our Discord to stay up to date on the latest developments, share your feedback, and meet other writers.

Original source

WHAT'S NEW

Ellipsus is Now in Open Beta

Growth comes from love, not the other way around. Last fall, we kicked off the closed beta for Ellipsus with the goal of making a writing tool people love. After months of product cycles and conversations with our community, we’re ready to bring Ellipsus to a broader audience.

Now anyone can join the beta; collaborate with their co-authors, editors, and beta readers; and help shape the future of Ellipsus.

Written by
John McClelland
Rex Mizrach
Kate Donahue

PUBLISH DATE
28/05/2024

(Re)introducing Ellipsus

The genesis for Ellipsus stems from a deeply personal experience. Writing together is still fucking hard! How do we know? After leaving my last company in 2022, my partner Rex and I started to work on a meta-modern space opera. We struggled to organize our thoughts. Valuable comments were lost across various drafts. Inevitably, important context would get scrapped, leaving us frustrated and demotivated.

Writing at the same time wasn’t the issue. But exploring directions, reconvening, and bringing our ideas back together was impossible. So, by the end of 2022, our space opera was (temporarily) set aside in favor of a bigger idea.

With Ellipsus, we want to make it easy for anyone to write together—no matter how many editors, reviewers, or co-authors are involved. It’s still early days, but here are a few things that have stood out to our closed beta testers.

Wrangle your big, hairy ideas (and extra-long docs)

Google Docs is made for memos. But manuscripts? It’s a messy, disconnected process. The more people you add, the more edits made, or the longer the document—the more it breaks. During our early user research, we consistently heard that Google Docs strained to support larger documents, buckling once a document crept past 30,000 words.

Ellipsus powers writers writing stories in the hundreds of thousands of words. And, most importantly, it powers writers writing big works together. Since 2006, Google Docs has relied on the server-first Operational Transformation (OT). We combine the more modern, local-first Conflict-free Replicated Datatypes (CRDT) and Git-like version control. (This is why we often tell folks to think of us as “GitHub for writers.") This lets us offer a deeper level of collaboration and control, and greater granularity when it comes to who wrote what, when. In turn, you have full creative control without the mess.

Collaborate freely on any device

We’ve surveyed and interviewed hundreds of writers over the past year to understand just how essential collaboration is to their workflow. Writers lean on their community for fact-checking, role-playing dialogue, beta reading, line edits, and more. And when writing tools lack a collaborative layer or can’t support complex works, they have to enlist Discord, email, or even WhatsApp to work with others.

Ellipsus aims to make writing effortlessly collaborative for writing projects of every size. With drafts and version history, co-authors and editors have the space to riff on existing ideas and explore new ones, without worry about work getting lost. With comments and in-app chat, writers can jot down ideas, solicit real-time feedback, and discuss work to be done in one place—no additional apps needed.

Write with rights

In a world where generative AI is insinuating itself into nearly every creative field, writers are rightfully concerned about protecting their work. But AI is just the latest threat in a long history of published works being plagiarized, censored, or purged.

We are unwaveringly writer-centric. That means we don’t police or lay claim to your art—it’s yours and yours alone—and we don’t place limits on what you can create, whether it’s NSFW, LGBT+, etc. We’re currently working with lawyers to make our stance explicit in the form of a rock-solid, user-friendly privacy policy.

The road to open beta

Getting here was no easy feat. And it certainly isn’t something we can take full credit for; at every step of the way, our community of early beta testers helped guide us with their ideas, wishes, and constructive feedback.

Entering beta carries a certain implicit risk: What if no one uses what we’re building? After all, not every test is a guaranteed success. Fortunately, we discovered early on that there’s a segment of writers that were very happy to pour their trust, sweat, and creativity into Ellipsus, despite the occasional technical hiccup.

Roughly 20% of our monthly active writers are what we call “power writers”—logging in multiple times a week, often switching between a laptop and smartphone, and writing for hours on end. This group has been instrumental in proving out the value of more experimental features like drafts and in-app chat, and pushing us to prioritize improvements around mobile web and large document management.

Our Discord community has been another pleasant surprise. Getting to play any part in facilitating writer-to-writer connections gives us major warm fuzzies. And seeing early signs that our writers aren’t just people like us, they’re people we like, has been incredibly motivating. In addition to improving our product, you can bet we’ll be doubling down on Discord to help spark conversations and give writers a safe, positive place to hone their craft.

What's ahead: public launch

We plan to officially rip the beta label off of Ellipsus and launch later this summer. There’s still lots to build and fine-tune before we can hit that milestone, and we need help to get there.

That’s where you come in!

As a writer in our open beta, you get to have a direct say in something being built for People. Like. You. You can also connect with likeminded freak-flag fliers in our Discord.

Sign up for Ellipsus

Original source

Get your writing into and out of Ellipsus

In October, we worked to make it easier to migrate your older documents, pick up on your WIPs, and share your work.

Import Markdown files

Markdown is an easy-to-use markup language—if you use programs like Discord and Slack, you’ve probably already used basic Markdown to format your text. Our rich text editor has long-supported Markdown shortcuts, so using this language for the first version of our importer was a natural choice.

Now, you can export files from Google Docs, Scrivener, or other sources and import them into Ellipsus.

This is the first of many steps toward a proper .docx importer. But to reach that goal, we need to make our editor more robust (think text colors, more flexible text styles, etc.). Watch this space. 👀

Export to Archive of Our Own

Did you know that 66% of Ellipsus writers have shared their writing on Archive of Our Own? We know that lots of writers struggle with formatting their work for AO3, so we wanted to take the pain out of publishing. (Sorry, whumpers.)

When you’re ready to share, click Export to AO3 — Ellipsus will copy your work as HTML and open AO3 in a new tab. If you’re signed into AO3 on that browser, you can jump right in and post a new work.

Collaborate more efficiently

While we may never make the collaborative process completely mess-free, we can make it much smoother, starting with user experience and additional permissions.

Invite recent collaborators

Entering the same email over and over gets old fast. Ellipsus now suggests your five most recent collaborators, so you can quickly invite them to new documents.

Choose which collaborators can merge

Collaboration can take a lot of forms—from co-authors to beta readers. We want Ellipsus to support these myriad relationships and offer helpful guardrails on how collaborators can (or can’t) interact with your writing.

To kick things off, we’re introducing a new role aimed at writing partners and co-authors. Open the Collaborators modal, enter an email, and choose a role.

• Collaborators who can edit can create and edit drafts, compare drafts to the main document, and collaborate via chat and comments.
• Collaborators who can merge can do all the above, plus they can merge drafts and write directly in the main document.

Along with this change, we’ll now notify you and your collaborators when drafts are merged so you can open the doc and check out the latest changes.

Take control over formatting

You won’t be shocked to learn that writers have Very Strong Opinions about the best way to set up their workspace and get words flowing. Since no two writers are exactly the same, we want to make Ellipsus flexible enough to cater to various workflows.

Format text faster on desktop

Key actions should be easily within reach. And sometimes shortcuts just can’t replace a good ol’ button. We’ve added an (optional!) formatting bar to the bottom of the editor so you can easily style your text and undo/redo actions when working on larger devices.

Set your editor preferences

We want writers to feel comfortable in Ellipsus. Part of that is making sure the functions they need are just a few taps away. Another part is making sure you can easily hide any potential distractions.

We’re introducing editor settings to give you more control over your writing experience.

• Manage smart formatting: Customize quotes, apostrophes, dashes, and ellipses. You can also turn off markdown formatting.
• Update collaboration settings: If you don’t like the feeling of being watched, you can hide live cursors and collaboration avatars.
• Update display settings: Show or hide the desktop formatting bar and word count, and switch between light and dark mode.

Want to hear about the latest updates as they happen? Join our Discord to follow announcements and share your feedback.

Original source