Features
Shaped around the way books are actually made, paragraph by paragraph, scene by scene. Everything below ships today.
The Page
Words settle onto real, bordered pages, one after another, with ornamental breaks marking each scene. Your manuscript takes the shape of a finished book rather than an endless scroll, so pacing and chapter weight are visible at a glance.
Headings, bold and italic, blockquotes, lists, and ornamental dividers render as you type, while the formatting marks themselves slip out of sight until your cursor returns to the line.
A single keystroke reveals the clean markdown beneath the page, the same plain text saved to disk, and returns you to the book exactly where you were.
The line you're writing holds steady at a height you choose while the page rises to meet it, so your eyes rest in one place through hours at the desk.
One keystroke clears the room: shelf, outline, and every panel fall away until nothing remains but the page and the words on it. A brush of the cursor at the screen's edge brings the room back.
A purpose-built history remembers your work in natural steps and stays instant even across a book-length manuscript, so no edit is ever a one-way door.
Always in View
A quiet status line keeps a live count of words and characters, pages, words written today and this session, and progress toward the day's goal. Select text and the counts scope to the selection.
Set a target in words or in pages and watch the day's work accumulate toward it, rather than guess at it.
Your file is saved continuously as you write; there is no command to remember and nothing to lose to a forgotten keystroke.
The Quiet Helpers
Sentences open with capitals, quotation marks curl correctly, a true em dash replaces the double hyphen, and an ellipsis forms from three dots: the hundred small chores of clean typography, done the instant before you'd notice.
Spelling is checked as you go and common stumbles corrected from a list you can extend, while a guard leaves your rare or invented words untouched. Every helper switches off in a moment if you'd rather write unassisted.
Open a bracket or a quotation mark and its partner appears, with the cursor waiting between them.
Shaping the Prose
Bold and italics, headings at every level, blockquotes, and bulleted or numbered lists are each a single gesture from the keyboard or a right-click, and the page stays clean text underneath.
Begin a chapter with a grand drop capital that sinks into the lines beneath, or a raised initial: the flourish of the old printed books, carried through to the finished export.
Collect draws a run of scattered lines into a single paragraph; Separate breaks a dense block back into one sentence per line for close revision.
Your Library
Every chapter, scene, note, and fragment lives in a tidy tree along the edge of the room, created, renamed, duplicated, reordered, sorted, and dragged between folders in place. Hover any file to read its opening lines without opening it.
Search the whole project at once and see every file a word appears in, with a count for each. Rename a character across every file in one move, after a preview of how many changes, with a recoverable copy of each file taken first.
An outline of the current chapter's headings stands ready beside the page, with drag-and-drop that moves whole sections, heading and prose together. Restructure a manuscript by dragging its table of contents.
Reach any file in your system's own file manager in a click, and reopen Lectern to find your last directory, last file, and expanded folders exactly as you left them.
Make It Yours
Four crafted themes reshape the whole room: paper, ink, accents, and the light around the page. Lectern Light and Lectern Dark are drawn from the mark itself, parchment and cobalt ink; Necropolis Light and Necropolis Dark are the house in morning mist and at dusk, gray stone with crimson at the door.
Seven typefaces (Georgia, Times, Palatino, Garamond, Bookman, a clean sans, and Courier), each set to the size, color, and spacing you prefer.
Page width, margins, line spacing, paragraph indent and spacing, caret color, the page's shadow, the glow of a selection. Every measure bends to your hand until the page reads exactly as you like.
Every shortcut is listed and yours to reassign, so the controls fit the hands that have always used them.
Peace of Mind
Before every save, Lectern keeps a quiet snapshot of the previous version, holding as many as you choose, so any wrong turn is recoverable.
Fold the whole project, or only its writing, into a single archive whenever you wish, carry your settings between machines, and update in place. Your settings travel without your API key, and Lectern never uploads your work. The only words that ever leave your device are the passages you choose to send when you run an optional AI process, under your own key.
The Compendium
Keep a private reference of your story's people, places, and lore, each entry named, with any number of aliases and tags. Name a character once, with every name they answer to, and a whole series can share one Compendium so the world stays consistent from book to book.
When the AI writes, it recognizes the names and aliases in your prose and draws the matching entries in automatically, so the details it produces stay true to the world you've built, with nothing to link by hand.
Artificial Intelligence, in Your Voice
An AI assistant waits at a keystroke. Draft the next beat from a one-line note, continue a passage in flow, copy-edit a clumsy line, or rephrase a sentence, and define your own custom processes besides. The text streams onto the page in your voice; you bring your own key and choose any model, so the intelligence is yours to direct and the cost yours to control.
Set the tense, point of view, focal character, and a prose style guide once, and every suggestion is shaped to your novel's voice. Each process carries its own model, its own output color, and the choice to replace your text or write alongside it.
Select a word and call up a thesaurus drawn in context: not a flat list, but fresher choices that fit the sentence you're actually writing.
A more elegant pair than underline and strikethrough. Highlight your foreshadowing so the AI knows where you're heading; Whiteout a passage to keep it from the AI until you decide whether it's worthy. On export, Highlight's color falls away and Whiteout passages are left behind entirely.
The Spoken Word
Speak, and your words settle onto the page as text. Choose your microphone, let a pause end the session on its own, and keep drafting with your eyes off the keys. Dictation runs on your own Deepgram key: your voice travels only to Deepgram, only while you speak, and never to us.
Hear your pages read back in a voice you choose, at the speed, volume, and sentence pacing you set, while a soft highlight follows each spoken sentence across the page. Prose reveals its rhythm out loud, and Whiteout passages stay unspoken.
Sending It Into the World
Export to a fully styled Word document, a print-ready PDF, or an EPUB for e-readers, with headings, emphasis, blockquotes, lists, and your illuminated capitals all intact, set in the typeface and spacing you chose, with stray reference links quietly removed so only the story reaches the page. Save each design as a Folio and reuse it book after book.
Compile an entire folder of chapters into one Word document, or merge scattered scene files into a single manuscript in whatever order you set. The long work of assembling a draft, done in a single step.
A Study of Your Own Design
Beyond the four themes, tune the color and style of every element (page, accents, dividers, the spellcheck mark, the glow on a recognized name), then save your design and carry it, with your custom AI processes, to any desk.
AI and Voice features are optional and bring-your-own-key: no model costs, no usage markup, and no third-party data passing through us. Founder's Edition: $29, one payment, lifetime license. See pricing →
Ready for Pro?
Unlock the Compendium, the AI assistant in your voice, Dictate and Orate, styled manuscript export, and the theme studio. One payment, lifetime license, all future updates.
Buy Lectern Pro for $29