Edda 5.3: Beta-Reader Portal, Encrypted Sync and Campaign Mode

This release came out of a long audit: we went through every claim on this site, checked each one against the app, and then built or fixed whatever did not hold up. What follows is the list, grouped by where you will notice it.

Twelve writing modes

Edda 5.0 added screenplays, poetry and lyrics. 5.3 brings the total to twelve: novel, screenplay, sitcom, stage play, audio drama, podcast, comic, academic, interactive fiction, picture book, poetry and lyrics.

• Scripts. Sitcom, stage play, audio drama, podcast and comic scripts each get their own format. Screenplays gain a locked draft with revision colours and a runtime estimate.
• Academic writing. Footnotes in any prose project; in academic projects also endnotes, citations in author-date (APA), Chicago or MLA style, and a matching bibliography.
• Interactive fiction. Branching stories export as Twee 3 source for Twine, or as a Markdown gamebook.
• Picture books are laid out as spreads.
• Poetry now has 47 forms plus free verse, with refrain checking. Lyrics get chord charts, melody notes, transposing and ChordPro export.
• Find and replace covers every kind of mode document, and the sprint bar now runs in every editor.

The manuscript

• Parts sit above chapters and scenes. Each part has a status and a synopsis, and folds away in every manuscript view.
• Statuses are the same everywhere: To Do, Draft, Revised and Done.
• Crash recovery now really recovers. If Edda or your computer stops before a save, the next time you open the scene Edda shows what changed and offers the unsaved text back.
• Edda saves a few seconds after you stop typing. The Save button and Ctrl+S are there when you want to save at once.
• Export a scene, a chapter, a part or the whole book from the writer or the manuscript menu. DOCX, PDF and EPUB keep your italics, bold and the rest of your formatting, and Markdown, HTML and plain text are real conversions.
• Split a scene in two at the cursor; split screen can show a chapter beside its notes or a research item.
• Focus mode dims everything but the current paragraph, and distraction-free mode can play rain, cafe, fireplace or nature sounds.
• Word frequency works on a scene, a chapter or the whole manuscript, and marks weak words and adverbs in the text itself.
• Typing two hyphens gives an em dash, and a hyphen between numbers gives an en dash, as in export.

Beta readers

• An online reading portal. Give each reader a private link. They read in the browser with your formatting intact, comment on any paragraph and answer your questionnaire, and you sync their feedback back into Edda. Links can expire or be closed. The portal is the one part of Edda that uses our server, and only for the draft you choose to share.
• Fingerprints and leak tracing. Every copy, in the portal or as PDF, DOCX or EPUB, carries an invisible fingerprint in the text, plus an optional visible mark. Paste an excerpt from a leaked copy into the leak tracer and Edda names the reader.
• Reader profiles, NDA terms with renewal history, a status pipeline, deadlines, the version each reader has, and batch export for a whole group.

Worldbuilding and continuity

• A continuity engine. Edda flags scenes set before a character is born or after they die, a character in two places at once, places used before they are founded or after they are destroyed, events out of dependency order, dates outside their era, sessions that go back in time, and characters acting on facts they have not learned yet.
• Campaign Mode for game masters: sessions with encounters and hooks, factions, a fact graph of who knows what, and recap and handout export.
• A relationship web of your whole cast, with two-way relationships.
• Character arcs in ordered stages, tied to chapters, scenes or beats and shown on the story timeline. Personality, backstory and the other long character fields are now rich text.
• Images and galleries on characters, locations and articles; maps with regions, routes and markers linked to timeline events.
• Calendars with eras that restart the year count, moons and cycles drawn on the month grid, one-off holidays, and birth and death dates.
• Family trees with a generations layout, unions and bloodlines, ready to export and print.
• Tags on everything, from characters and scenes to maps, eras, facts and factions, with one tag browser.
• A Kingdom location type, and nested locations to any depth.

Plotting and research

• Save your own plot templates alongside the ten built in. Plots remember their template, and a character-arc plot follows its character.
• Place beats on scenes and see whether each lands early or late against where the structure puts it.
• Research holds file attachments, web clips, an image grid and a mood board.
• The trope bible has 1,021 tropes, one entry each, and a trope tracker in the writer. Amazon keywords now fill KDP's seven keyword boxes.
• Global search finds plot points, links, factions, facts, sessions, map markers, calendar events and family members, and every hit opens the item itself.

The Skald, goals and publishing

• A per-project style sheet: preferred spellings and capitals, numbers, dialogue punctuation and the serial comma, checked as you write.
• The chapter report covers every scene in a chapter, and each flag shows the whole sentence around it. The prompt library has 135 prompts.
• Sprints from 5 to 180 minutes with pause and resume, saved history and personal records. Goals add a monthly summary, rest days, deadline pace and a year heatmap.
• Print checks follow the printer you chose, KDP or IngramSpark, and only run on books. 22 compile themes, including the new Saga, Noir and Fairy Tale.
• An optional copyright-page disclaimer, with the standard fiction disclaimer one click away; foreword, preface, afterword, subtitle, edition and imprint.

Your files, sync and privacy

• Project files. Export any project as one .edda.json file and open it on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android or iOS. It carries the whole book, worldbuilding included.
• End-to-end encrypted sync. Desktop sync to a folder or your own Google Drive can now be encrypted on your computer with a passphrase only you know (AES-256). Google Drive sign-in keeps working without signing in again every hour.
• A plain-text mirror. On desktop, turn it on in Settings > Data and Edda also writes every chapter, character, location, article and timeline as a Markdown file in a folder you choose. It is a read-only copy for grep, git or your backup tool.
• Backups and restore on phones, and restore on desktop shows what will change and makes a backup first.
• The old account sign-in code is gone. Edda has a licence key and no accounts.

Phones and tablets

The Android app now runs the same engine as the desktop, on a database on the device. Screenplays, poems, songs and the other modes open on a phone; the manuscript has all four views, folding parts and touch reordering; compile, search, find and replace, mood boards, and maps and family trees you can pan and pinch-zoom all work under a finger. Dictation runs on the device when Android's offline language pack is installed. Folder and Google Drive sync stay on the desktop: on a phone, move a project with its project file.

The iPhone and iPad app is built and in beta testing now, ahead of its App Store release. Leave your email and we will tell you the day it is out.

Licence keys

Licence keys now work on the platform they were bought for, each on up to three devices. A Complete Bundle comes with one key per platform: Windows and Linux, macOS, Android, and iPhone and iPad ready for launch. Keys bought before 19 October 2026 keep working on every platform. The Android app now checks your key with edda.ink, as the desktop app does, so it needs a connection once to activate. You can see and free up a key's devices in the app's Settings or at edda.ink/devices.

Getting 5.3

Edda 5.3 is a free update for Windows, macOS (Apple Silicon), Linux and Android. On Windows, macOS and the Linux AppImage, your installed copy updates itself. If you use the Linux .deb, or Edda on Android, download the new version from the download page and install it over the old one; your projects stay where they are.

Want to try it first? The live demo runs in your browser and saves nothing.