September 28, 2026
Since the very first prototype, Plainchant on a computer has meant two panes side by side: your text on the left, the formatted screenplay on the right. It is a good way to learn Fountain, and a good way to check a page. It is not always a good way to write.
Sometimes you want nothing but the words. Sometimes you want to read the script as a reader would, without the plain text beside it. Until today, only phones and tablets could do that.
Above the preview there are now three small buttons:
When the preview is hidden, the buttons move up into the editor's own header, so they are always where you can see them. From the keyboard, Ctrl (or Cmd) + Shift + 1, 2 or 3 does the same, and puts you straight back in the text. Plainchant remembers your choice.
Nothing else changes when a pane is hidden. The colours in the editor follow its new width, focus mode still works, and the Page view simply waits until the preview is showing again before it catches up.
Shortly after Page view shipped, it stopped working for its first real user. The browser's console had the answer: an ad blocker had refused to load one of the app's files.
The file was called pageview.js. To a person, that means
"the code for Page view". To an ad blocker, "pageview" is the word
analytics companies use for counting visitors, so the file looked exactly
like a tracker and was blocked. Plainchant has no trackers of any kind,
but the blocker had no way of knowing that from a file name.
The file has a new name, and the tests now refuse any file name that an ad blocker is likely to mistake for tracking. The automated tests run in a browser with no extensions, so they could never have caught this on their own. It took a real person, in a real browser.
One more idea came up this week: fixing a typo straight in the formatted preview, without going back to the text. It is on the roadmap, with a first sketch. Double-click a paragraph in the preview and it opens in place, showing that paragraph's own lines, ready for a quick touch-up. The text would stay the one true version of the script, and the preview would never become a second, competing editor.
The tests now stand at 338 unit tests under Node, and 325 unit tests plus 712 checks of the app in a real browser. The new layouts are also covered by the accessibility check, in every theme.
The next step is whichever matters most to the people writing with Plainchant: quick edits in the preview, opening Final Draft files, or something the hands-on testing turns up first.