Characters Codex  ·  Detected from the manuscript  ·  No AI required

The Characters Codex.

By the time a novel reaches its third act, the cast list is longer than you think and the question of who was in chapter nine has no quick answer. Draftline reads the manuscript and builds the codex for you: everyone in the book, which chapters each of them appears in, how often, and with whom. In the demo manuscript that is 28 characters and 1,251 relationships, which is more than anyone keeps in their head.

Characters — characters · — relationships
Cycling views Sorted by
A working miniature of the codex, populated with the demo manuscript. It cycles through Grid, Heatmap, and Intertwined until you interact with it; click a character, switch the view, or run Re-Detect. In the app, the same screen is built from your own book.
How it knows

Character detection.

You do not fill in character sheets. You write the book, and when you run detection Draftline reads the narrative chapters, skipping covers, contents pages, and acknowledgments, and finds the people in them. It runs on your machine and nothing is sent anywhere: no LLM, no model making judgments about your book, no API call. It is local deterministic processing and rules over your own sentences, and every conclusion points at the lines that produced it.

Re-detection and review
After a revision pass you run Re-Detect and the codex is rebuilt from the current text, while the roles, descriptions, and corrections you entered by hand are kept wherever a character still matches by name or alias. Candidates the detector is unsure about, including ships, institutions, and other non-person story actors, go to a separate Needs Review list, where you confirm or reject them before they can appear in any count.
Roles
Every character carries a role you set yourself, from a fixed list of five: protagonist, antagonist, supporting, minor, or other. Detection files each newly found character as minor and leaves the rest to you, and because the role is stored with the character rather than derived from mention counts, a role you set once survives every later re-detection.
Corrections
If "Dorian" and "Lieutenant Hale" have been filed as two people, you open "Same as…" and merge them, and the duplicate becomes an alias. If the twins have been merged into one, you split them; if a place has been mistaken for a person, you mark it "Not a character." Each correction is stored against the name and its aliases rather than an internal ID, so it is re-applied on every future detection as long as it still identifies exactly one entity.
Three views

Three views.

Grid view
One cell per character per chapter, filled where the character appears and empty where they do not. You read it for gaps: the detective who goes quiet for eleven chapters, the love interest who vanishes exactly when the subplot needed her, the walk-on from chapter two who was never paid off. While you are drafting, an absence of that size is invisible; in the grid it is a blank stretch you can see from across the room.
Heatmap view
The same cast and chapters, but each cell is shaded by how many times the character is mentioned, so a chapter they dominate is bright and a chapter they pass through is faint. When you sort by mentions, the rows arrange themselves by weight and you can check whether the protagonist actually carries the middle of the book or whether a side character has taken over act two without your noticing.
Intertwined view NEW
Each character becomes a colored rail running left to right through the book, and the rail breaks wherever that character is off the page. Where two characters interact in a chapter, a curve crosses between their rails at that point, so a friendship or a rivalry reads as a braid rather than as a list of chapter numbers. When you select a character, everyone unrelated to them fades back and their own crossings stay lit.
Mentions

Mentions and relationships.

Need to know whether a character has ever been named in chapter fourteen? Every mention is indexed with its chapter, and the codex shows each one with a short excerpt of the surrounding text, drawn from the manuscript around the recorded position, so you can recognize the line before you go to it. Click "Jump to chapter" and the editor opens that chapter.

Relationships are built from the same index. Two confirmed characters who share chapters share a tie, and the codex records the first appearance of each character and the first chapter in which any two of them meet, so when chapter nineteen has two people reminiscing about a meeting the manuscript never shows, you can check the date.

"Ask Ada Okafor," she said, and would not say anything more.
Chapter 27Jump to chapter →
The letter was signed twice — the second time by Ada Okafor.
Chapter 14Jump to chapter →
Ada Okafor and Iris Calder first share a chapter · Chapter 1
In development
PlotWalker → The codex is the roster that the continuity engine being built into Draftline will draw on. PlotWalker is not enabled in the beta yet; this page describes the direction.
Spelling
Confirmed names join the project lexicon → Every name and alias you confirm in the codex is added to a per-project lexicon that the spell checker reads, so none of the 28 characters is ever flagged as a misspelling.
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