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Timeline Studio

Every Event in Its Place.

Chronological timelines with swimlane views, custom fantasy calendars (because 365-day Earth years don't fit every world), event relationships, and character arc tracking. Plus an extractor that pulls dates out of your prose automatically, so your timeline stays in sync with what you've actually written.

Ishvana Timeline Studio showing chronological event list with categories and importance levels
01/ Foundation

Timelines & Events

Create timelines at any scale — years, decades, centuries, eras, ages. Populate them with events categorized by type and importance, each with rich metadata and cross-links.

Timeline Properties

Name, description, time scale (years/decades/centuries/eras/ages), era labels, start and end dates, tags, and preferred view mode.

Event Editor

Title, description, display date (supports fictional date formats), duration, category, importance level, color override, lane assignment, and tags.

7 Event Categories

Political, Cultural, Technological, War, Religious, Natural, and Economic. Each category has a default color for instant visual parsing on the timeline.

4 Importance Levels

Minor, Moderate, Major, and Critical. Importance controls visual weight on the timeline and can be used as a filter to focus on pivotal moments.

02/ Swimlanes

Plotlines as Swimlanes

Organize events into parallel narrative threads. Each plotline becomes a horizontal lane on the timeline, showing how multiple storylines unfold simultaneously.

Timeline Events

Events with category badges, importance levels, plotline assignments, and linked lore entries.

Parallel Narrative Threads
Create plotlines with name, description, color, and sort order. Each plotline is a swimlane — events assigned to it appear in their own horizontal track.
Lane Assignment & Reordering
Drag events between lanes or assign them during creation. Events can belong to multiple lanes. Reorder lanes by priority to put the main storyline on top.
Collapse & Expand
Collapse lanes you're not focused on to reduce visual noise. Expand them when you need the full picture. The overview stays readable even with dozens of plotlines.
Multi-Event Selection
Select multiple events in swimlane view for batch operations — move to a different lane, change category, adjust importance, or delete in bulk.
03/ Connections

Event Links & Relationships

Events don't exist in isolation. Link them to characters, locations, and lore entries. Define causal relationships between events to build a web of cause and effect.

Cross-Links
Link events to characters, locations, documents, lore entries, items, and other events. Each link has an optional relationship label describing the connection.
5 Relationship Types
Causes, Follows, Simultaneous, Contradicts, and Enables. Temporal relationships that describe how events relate to each other in sequence and causality.
Lore Links
Three link types — references, auto_created, and derived_from — connect events to their Legendry entries with provenance tracking.
Bidirectional Sync
Links are bidirectional. Add a link from an event to a character, and it appears on both the event and the character's entry in the Legendry.
04/ Views

Three View Modes

See your timeline the way that serves your current task. Linear for reading, Swimlane for parallel plotting, Overview for the big picture.

Linear View

A chronological list. Events stacked vertically by date, with full details visible. Best for reading through history from start to finish.

Swimlane View

Parallel horizontal tracks with relationship lines connecting events across lanes. The primary working view for plotting complex, interwoven narratives.

Overview Mode

A bird's-eye minimap showing the entire timeline at once. Zoom into any region to see detail. Useful for spotting gaps, clusters, and pacing issues across centuries.

05/ Calendars

Custom Calendar Systems

Your world probably doesn't use the Gregorian calendar. Define your own — custom eras, months, day names, epoch labels, and date format templates. The timeline sorts and displays them natively, so "Year 1247 of the Third Age" is a real date the app can actually work with.

Fantasy Calendar Definition
Name your eras, define month names and lengths, create day-of-week cycles, set epoch labels. "The Third Age, Month of Embers, Day 14" is a valid date.
Date Format Templates
Define how dates display on the timeline. Use placeholders for era, year, month, day. Control whether events show "3A 1247" or "Year 1247 of the Third Age."
Conversion Functions
Sort key generation for correct chronological ordering. Format date for display. Calculate age between two dates in your calendar system.
Timeline Integration
Calendar-aware timelines sort and display events using your custom date system. Fictional dates sort correctly alongside real-world dates.
06/ Extraction

Date Extraction & Arc Points

Automatically extract dates from your manuscripts and track character emotional arcs across timeline events.

Auto-Extract Dates
Scan your manuscripts for date references — real-world patterns, fantasy date formats, and calendar-specific expressions. Each extraction suggests a timeline event.
Event Suggestion with Deduplication
Extracted dates are matched against existing events to avoid duplicates. New suggestions include the source text and document context for review.
Arc Points
Track character emotional arcs per plotline with a valence scale from 0 to 100. Plot the emotional journey of any character across the events they participate in.

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