September 27, 2026
Some good news arrived this week: a YouTuber who makes long, narrated videos about the history of classic adventure games has been writing with Plainchant, and likes it.
That raised a nice question. How do you thank someone like that? The answer was to build something for the kind of work they do: scripts that are read aloud to a microphone rather than performed on a set. None of it carries anyone's name. It is simply there for every narrator who needs it.
A screenplay's page count predicts screen time well enough, at roughly a minute a page. It says very little about a narrated video, where the words are everything and the pictures follow.
Script stats now include a read-aloud time, based on the words actually spoken. By default that means dialogue, which is how a narrator usually writes. A setting includes the action lines as well, for writers who read everything aloud. The reading speed starts at 150 words a minute and can be set anywhere from 80 to 300, so after reading a page against a clock, a narrator can make the estimate their own.
YouTube turns a list of timestamps in a video's description into chapters. Working those out by hand means scrubbing through a finished video and writing down times.
Plainchant can now do it from the script. Each top-level section
(# Part one) becomes a chapter, timed by the words read
aloud before it. The Export window lists them, ready to
copy and paste.
YouTube is strict about chapters, and quietly ignores a list that breaks its rules. So Plainchant checks them first:
If the list breaks a rule, Plainchant says which one, instead of letting the writer find out after uploading.
There is also a short narration example in Help, a script about how the Odyssey still works, to show all of this in action.
Anyone who grew up with adventure games remembers the colours. There is now a Retro theme in Settings, with square corners and hard shadows.
It started out in the navy blue of EGA-era games, and soon became pure CGA: black, cyan, magenta and white, the four colours many of us first saw on a computer screen. Every colour still passes the same readability check as the other themes.
In the retro theme only, the app understands a handful of commands from old text-parser games. Type one on a line of its own, press Enter, and an answer appears:
There are a few more to discover. None of them ever change the script: the answer only appears on screen, and the line you typed stays exactly as you wrote it.
Plainchant was tried in Firefox this week and works well there, as it does in Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers. Those are the targets.
Safari, on the Mac, iPhone and iPad, is now a distant future milestone. Mac users have plenty of Apple-only writing tools, and Firefox is one download away.
Phase four of the roadmap, the extras, is nearly done. What remains is the work that was being put off: making long scripts fast, and comparing one version of a script with another.
A feature-length script has started to feel sluggish when typing. That is next, to be measured before anything changes. After that, the biggest remaining step: letting a script live in a real file on your own disk, where every other program can see it too.