Hey everyone. I’m Petre. I’ve been a software engineer for about 15 years, and over the past year and a half, I’ve been working on my first fiction anthology.

While working on my manuscript, I became increasingly frustrated with the fragmented state of software for authors. If you write fiction, you usually have to duct-tape several tools together: you buy Scrivener to draft, pay a monthly subscription for an audio reader to proofread by ear, and then spend another $150 to $250 on formatting software like Vellum or Atticus just to get a clean book file. On top of that, almost every modern tool has moved to the cloud, introducing vague terms about how user data is handled.

I wanted a single, quiet workspace that could take a novel from rough planning all the way to physical print manufacture, entirely on my own machine, with zero cloud tracking and zero recurring fees. That is why I built Chronicle.

A few core things I focused on:

Drafting Workspaces: You can switch between a full studio workbench with your character dossiers and timeline open, a stripped-down Minimalist mode (Alt+M), or a full-screen Zen mode with typewriter scrolling and paragraph dimming.
The Cast Presence Grid: Instead of static character notes, the app scans your chapters locally to map out where characters appear across the book, helping you track alternating point-of-view balance and scene density.
Story Snapshots and Diffs: A visual, side-by-side revision tool. You can compare any previous draft against your current text and cherry-pick individual words or paragraphs to restore without rolling back the entire chapter.
Local Voice Proofreading: It runs the Kokoro neural speech model directly on your hardware via WebGPU and WebAssembly. It reads your text aloud with synchronized sentence tracking to help catch awkward cadence and typos, completely offline.
Print and Ebook Publishing: Chronicle doesn't just export a generic document. It compiles bookstore-ready Amazon KDP 6x9 trade paperback PDFs with mirrored spine gutter margins, running headers, and drop caps. It also outputs validated EPUB 3 and William Shunn formatted manuscripts for querying agents.

Chronicle is 100% free and open-source under the GNU AGPLv3. Your project files are simply uncompressed zip archives containing clean XHTML and JSON, so your work is never trapped in a proprietary format. It supports private WebDAV sync (like Nextcloud or home NAS setups), but requires zero accounts or internet access to work.

You can try the full studio directly in your browser without signing up, or download the desktop app for Windows, Linux and Mac (built with Tauri).

I'll be around all day to answer questions, discuss the technical architecture, or hear any feedback and edge cases you run into. Thanks for checking it out.

Chronicle - From first spark to published masterpiece

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