Manuscriptum is an Obsidian.md plugin for short story writers. It lets you export your stories as Microsoft Word .docx files that follow the Shunn modern manuscript format.
Features:
- Write your stories in a single note or a collection of notes.
- Save your stories as a Shunn manuscript document, ready for submission.
- Automatically create anonymous manuscripts.
Each of your stories must be in its own folder. The story's title is the name of the folder. You can write your stories either in a single note or in a collection of notes. Multiple notes will be treated as individual scenes and combined with a scene break (#) between each one. To add scene breaks to an individual note, use the Markdown format for horizontal lines (---).
One way to keep your notes in order is to number each scene note:
01 - At the Surface
02 - Into the Tunnel
03 - The First Encounter
Warning
Manuscriptum tries to sort the notes in the same order as they show up in your file explorer, but it will fail if you use a plugin that lets you manually change that sort order like Custom File Explorer sorting.
You can turn your story into a .docx file in two ways:
- Right click any note in your story folder or the story folder itself and select one of the "Save as manuscript..." Manuscripum commands from the context menu.
- Inside a note that contains any part of your story, open the command palette and select one of the Manuscriptum commands.
By default the story is put into a .docx file whose name matches the story's title, with spaces replaced by dashes.
Shunn format requires information about the author, such as your author name and contact information, which you can define in the plugin's settings. You can override these settings on a per-story basis by adding the following properties to any note in a story folder:
title: The story's title.filename: The filename to save the story to.outdir: The directory to save the story to.author: The author's name.surname: The author's surname.contact: The author's contact information.