Ellipsus Release Notes

The big news

June. Is there a sweeter (and hotter🔥) month? It has certainly been a busy one here at Ellipsus. In addition to the launch of Plus, we’ve been hard at work on making improvements to the tool (list view, anyone?), celebrating Pride with writers across our community, and tweeted at the Pope. What a time!

Here’s everything that happened at Ellipsus this month.

If you haven’t heard, this June we debuted Ellipsus Plus: a colorful, creative, and—of course!—human way to help us keep building Ellipsus independently and sustainably, while supporting the free plan available to everyone.

Plus gives you more ways to make Ellipsus your own by customizing your writing space, with tools to explore the patterns and choices shaping your craft, share your words in more personal and playful ways, and show the human process that brought your work to life.

Take a tour of everything in the plan (so far!) in our Plus Features Tour video!

All purchases and payment plans end in forever ownership of the Plus license (no eternal subscriptions!). You can start a free trial anytime—no payment info required.

Four new Writing Insights for Plus

And hot on the heels of the grand debut of Plus, we added four new metrics to Writing Insights.

Repeated phrases

Find the multi-word phrases that recur throughout your draft (including the ones that somehow appeared thirteen times without your beta noticing). You can sort through your top-ten most-used phrases (for phrases containing up to six words).

Dialogue balance

See your draft’s percentage of dialogue vs. narration, and where each appears throughout your doc.

Points of view

Explore how many sentences are written from each POV—first person, second, and third—and make extra-sure you didn’t accidentally switch halfway through (or just observe how perspective operates across a more experimental work).

Punctuation habits

See how frequently you use expressive punctuation marks per 1,000 words?!!!?!! (Yes!)

Writing Insights can make editing move a lot faster by helping you catch things that are easy to miss on the page (like POV shifts, phrases you’ve leaned on a bit too often, and lots of other patterns that aren't quite doing what you intended). Now, there are 14 Insights in total!

But they’re not only there to point out what you might want to improve! Together, your Insights create a kind of fingerprint of your writing style—showing you the rhythms and choices that make your voice yours. (We think that's pretty neat.)

Writing Insights runs locally in your browser—without AI, of course—and your text never leaves the editor for analysis.

Stay on top of your dashboard with list view for everyone

This one's for those of us with a thousand weirdly-titled WIPs on the dash... (you know who you are). Get on top of your docs and folders with our new list view for dashboard.

Super useful for writers whose dashboards have become a teeming mass of folders, notes, abandoned openings, alternate endings, and docs called things like Chapter-8-FINAL-final-REAL.

Try it out with our handy toggle located in the sorting menu at the top right of your dashboard.

And yes: list view is free for all! Because who doesn’t love a list?

We've got main character syndrome

We also added a new writing template to the Ellipsus template library—The Hero’s Journey.

You can access this and 19 other Ellipsus templates from your dash (click + New and From template).

You'll know this story structure: the hero is pushed out of their ordinary world on an adventure, facing obstacles, winning, and returning transformed.

It's a beloved tale that has been told thousands of times (Homer's Odyssey, Star Wars, Jane Eyre, and so many more)—so join the club and tell your version!

Use it as a full plotting framework or a deep dive into character motivations for a story already in progress—it’s your choice.

Preview

Preview

Key trial

Key trial

Since this stage represents the majority of the second act, add as many trials as you need to develop your story and build towards the next stage.

• Inciting incident:
• New allies:
• New enemies:
• Resolution:

The Inmost Cave

The stakes only keep rising, and pressure on the Hero builds. Stakes may become clearer, but also more layered and nuanced. There may be fallout from Key Trials from the previous stage that the Hero must grapple with (this can be an external crisis or the Hero's internal conflict, reflected in their worst traits taking control).

• Inner challenges:
• External challenges:
• Added stakes:

The Ordeal/Temptation

The central crisis or confrontation of the story. The Hero faces death (or their greatest fears). They may be presented with a terrible choice: achieve all they want, but at the highest cost.

• Crisis Event:
• Temptations:
• Tragic choice:

Pride, in all its multiplicities

Ahhh, Pride month. The parties (at our desks🫠), the long days (working to get Plus out on the dot), the yearning (… for everyone to upgrade to Plus)… It’s all just so gay! (Friendly reminder to support your fave “Gay GoogleDocs” and other queer-owned businesses!)

And just as every year, we wanted to pause and remember who we are, why we’re here, and the histories and communities that make Pride possible. So we shared a collection of 24 writing prompts for Pride to help you break away from standard narratives, deepen your queer stories and characters, explore new themes and possibilities, and reflect on what it means to be queer in all our glorious multiplicities.

Queer elders, found families, first transformations, old rebellions, the versions of ourselves we had to imagine before we knew they could exist…

You can find them all in our blog post. Happy Pride, Ellipsus fam. 🌈

We also invited writers from the Ellipsus community to tell us why Pride is important to them.

Watch the videos to hear what they had to say!

Bits n' bobs

• Certain rowdy outlines should no longer fall out of sync with document structure.
• It's now possible to cancel your Ellipsus Plus trial. (Never fear, you still won't get auto-charged when it ends).
• We've been busy on socials this month, weighing in on the crisis of AI-based AI verifiers on BlueSky and tweeting at the Pope (⁉⁉⁉ What a timeline...)
• YouTube essayist Roughest Drafts did a great deep dive video essay about our Emboss feature, and the larger issues surrounding human work vs. AI authorship accusations, with the question: how can we defend creative labor (and make the human process visible)?
• Shoutout to the Queer Liberation Library for exceeding their Pride fundraising goal!!

Thank you so much for making our biggest month yet such a phenomenal one.

Every person who writes with Ellipsus, tells a friend, joins the community, shares a post, sends us feedback, or chooses to support us through Plus helps us keep building and thriving.💆‍♂️

Onward and upward for July!

Happy writing and happy Pride,

The Ellipsus Team xo

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 Plus is here! Meet our optional paid plan, built from community feedback to keep Ellipsus independent, sustainable, and improving for everyone.

Custom themes, AI-free writing insights, a proof-of-work layer to support human writing, and a lot more!

Today is the biggest day for Ellipsus since we launched in 2023!

Back then, we began building Ellipsus with a simple belief: writers deserve a place to create, collaborate, and share their work without handing over their words, their data, or their creative process to bad actors and Big Tech—a promise that matters now, more than ever.

Generative AI has moved quickly into creative tools, writing platforms, publishing spaces—and seemingly every other corner of the internet—without consent, transparency, or respect for the writers whose work trained these systems in the first place. The need for independent human-first alternatives has never felt more urgent.

We see this reflected everyday in our growing community—Ellipsus is now home to nearly 600,000 writers (and counting!), hosting over 5 million documents. Writers are rejecting Big Tech's data mining model in favor of tools that respect user privacy and reflect our values.

We're so honoured that people are choosing Ellipsus to be their writing home. We're a small full-time team building, maintaining, supporting, and improving the tool every day.

And to keep doing that sustainably—without compromising the promises that brought people here—we’re introducing Ellipsus Plus.

Plus is a set of optional features on top of free Ellipsus. It helps fund the continued development of Ellipsus for everyone, free and paid; while helping us stay independent, ad-free, and working to improve the tool well into the future.

That means the Ellipsus you know is staying free: you can keep writing with unlimited documents, drafts, collaborators, and core features. Free Ellipsus will continue to receive updates, improvements, and new features too, including some major work already planned (like offline syncing and native apps).

Plus exists so we can keep building the tool you love.

https://youtu.be/XWlieX-amIw

Built from community feedback

Before deciding what Plus should be, we asked you—our 28k+ strong Discord community—what you wanted to see in a paid plan, and what sort of pricing felt fair to you.

More than 3,000 users responded to our survey on Ellipsus Plus. In that survey, we asked users what amount felt feasible and fair, and set our pricing to match accordingly. More than 70% of respondents said they liked or loved the idea of a subscribe-to-own model: a way to keep Ellipsus funded long-term, while breaking up the cost of the license in a way that works for our community.

Subscribe-to-own

We all have subscription fatigue. With the subscribe-to-own model, you can buy Plus outright with a one-time purchase, or join the annual or monthly payment plans. Your payments count toward ownership of your Ellipsus Plus license.

We think ownership of creative tools is non-negotiable. Every Plus subscription leads to ultimate ownership of the tool. Not metaphorical ownership, but real ownership, including all future updates to the Plus plan.

With any plan, you can start using all Plus features immediately; and once it’s paid in full, you own Ellipsus Plus forever. No endless subscriptions.

And when we asked what Plus features people wanted to see, the top requests included supporting Ellipsus and helping keep it sustainable—hell yeah!—AI-safety features, custom themes, and writing insights.

So… that’s what we built!

The features

Our introductory Plus features are designed to be fun, creative, practical, and help you get the most out of the tool!

We really hope you enjoy them.

Custom themes

You know we love a good theme. We also know every story has a whole personality and mood of its own—smutty vampiric melodrama, candlelit yearning, an academic thesis on why the villain had a point, or this GIF understands my protagonist better than I do.

With custom themes, you can design your writing space using any colors, gradients, images, and GIFs. Chill, romantic, moody, gothic, sparkly, Myspace-ified, meme’d, or an homage to that particular character (you know the one) who won’t leave you alone? Make as many as you want. The choices are (for all practical and mildly dangerous purposes) infinite.

You can also attach custom themes to Reader links when you share your work with others, use them as backdrops for your shareable Snippets, and easily export and import themes to share with friends and your community.

We can’t freaking wait to see what you come up with.

Emboss

Emboss is our proof-of-work layer for human writing.

Instead of relying on unreliable “AI-powered” “verifiers” that judge a piece after the fact, ignite witch hunts, and occasionally appear to believe a particular punctuation is probable cause (Em Dash Defense Squad chiming in), Emboss is AI-free, and comes from real writing-process data from inside Ellipsus: time spent writing, sessions, edits, thinking pauses, revisions, and other selected metrics you choose to share—your Writing Journey.

Emboss lets you show the human labor behind your work through an authorship badge and metrics card attached to a document, draft, or Reader link. Your Emboss data is private by default, and only visible if you choose to share it.

You can also opt to share selected snapshots of your version history on Reader links to show how the work came together.

And this is all without data scraping or AI algorithms purporting to know whether you “sound human” enough. Instead, Emboss shows the record of the labor, care, and love that went into your work.

(AKA… the human stuff.)

Writing insights

Writing insights gives you a clearer view of your own prose. You can spot patterns across nine metrics, including vocabulary diversity, sentence length, sentence rhythm, paragraph density, sentence openers, passive voice, adverbs, word frequency, and repeated echoes.

These insights are created from simple pattern-counting inputs that run locally on your device. That means (say it with us!) no AI is used, and your text never leaves the editor.

It’s a great way to understand the texture and flow (and let’s be honest… the wonky bits) of your own writing: what makes your words yours, so you can keep writing, and keep improving.

Customizable Snippets

Our expanded Snippets feature lets you turn your favorite lines into shareable images, now customizable to make those words pop. You can match a Snippet to your custom theme, upload an image or GIF, use any Ellipsus font, any color choice, and add byline credits for authors or characters. Then send your words out into the world looking their best.

... And this isn't all of Ellipsus Plus. There will be more features added as we build, alongside improvements to the free plan—soon.

A better Ellipsus for everyone

Ellipsus Plus is here to help us build sustainably: for writers on the free plan, for Plus writers, and for the long-term future of Ellipsus and independent creative tools.

We hope you’re as excited about Plus as we are! There’s tons more to come, and we can’t wait to build it for you. Free or paid, Ellipsus is going to keep getting better.

Thank you for your support; now please, go forth and explore! You can start your 7 day free trial any time.

Have questions about Plus? We’re hosting an “Ask the Team” doc where we’ll be answering your burning questions. Please make comments there!

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

Spring is all about new beginnings. Here at Ellipsus, we’re coming out of the long, dark winter with fresh features and updates, plus a big survey on creativity in the age of AI, and how we fight back against the slopocalypse.

(Someone’s gotta do it.)

Pages vs. Pageless

We've added a way to paginate your writing, control page formatting, navigate by page number, and see what your work would look like in print.

Learn all about pages in the Help Center!

Survey on creativity in the age of AI

What does it actually feel like to be a writer in the age of AI? We ran a survey to hear directly from the people doing the work. The response was overwhelming, and confirmed much of what we've all been thinking.

97.8% of respondents avoid suspected AI-generated work. There's a basic change in how we approach what we read: we no longer assume there’s a human on the other end.

Almost half of respondents worry their work could be mistaken for AI—and 99.5% think people should have the right to know if work was written by a human or not.

Human writing = resistance. But despite AI content flooding creative spaces, most writers say they’re writing more than ever—in spite of "effortless slop", for the joy of making something only they could make.

TL;DR: if you hate AI, you're far from alone—but resistance is needed and possible, especially by staying creative. So keep the words coming, and beat back the bots!

Check out the full survey findings in the blog post!

A survey for authors

• Do you self-publish your writing?
• Do you publish online to an audience?
• Do you submit your work professionally?

We’d love to hear about how you work, and which tools help along the way.

Take this short survey, and help shape what we build next.

Weekly writing prompts

We'll be sharing writing prompts on social media, and you can also get them emailed right to your inbox.

If you'd like to receive an email with three human-authored writing prompts every Monday, click here! (Psst—We'll even send you a bonus prompt.)

The ultimate template for fictional religions

Our newest world-building template (and most in-depth yet!) helps you craft a detailed belief system that's deeply rooted in your world.

Preview the Fictional Religion & Deity Template on Ellipsus.

Writing Fantasy Worlds: Tips for Making a Fantastical World Feel Real

Writer and guest contributor Heather Sykes shared their tips for creating immersive, believable fantasy worlds that live on in your readers' minds.

Read the full post here.

And more!

• You can now preview templates—we've added Reader links for each one: find them in the Help Center!
• We've tweaked the Settings page layout to make future changes easier.
• After what felt like both a hundred years and a blink of an eye, AO3 exited open beta! Celebrate by posting a fic of your own directly from Ellipsus.
• Last but not least—we're open to blog submissions on craft, content, and culture. (Here's how to write for us!)

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

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