Cheese Paper

Cheese Paper

Organize your writing. Keep your notes with the text. Sync your project files.

Cheese Paper is a text editor specifically designed for writing, particularly fiction. Whether it's the story itself or notes about your characters, Cheese Paper files are simple and support syncing, so you can create, edit, move, or delete things, no matter what device you're on.

Cheese Paper stores notes and other information directly with each scene in a minimal file format. The resulting files can be edited in any text editor, including on a phone. Changes outside the editor will not break anything, even if the editor is still running at the same time.

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Features

See your notes as you write

Cheese Paper keeps your notes visible as you're writing the scene. This can be used to jot down something for later, to plan our where a scene will go before writing, or to summarize a scene after you've written it to get a better high level overview of your story.

Pairing with other programs

The underlying text in Cheese Paper is Markdown, which is still readable as plain text. Summaries and notes are added in a TOML header, also relatively simple to edit. Any files created outside the editor are automatically read in and processed like any other files, even if some or all of the metadata is missing. Even when editing files by hand, you can just fill in the parts that you care about, and let Cheese Paper handle the rest. See the file format section in the manual for more information on this.

Cheese Paper also plays nicely with syncing programs - if you sync project files that are saved on your computer, Cheese Paper will automatically load your changes while it's still running. This includes operations including creating new files, editing existing files, moving files around, and deleting files.

Stay in control of your data

Cheese Paper is not an online service that will sell your data or start charging you a monthly fee for important features. Cheese Paper itself is a purely offline program, so your files never have to leave your computer (except for backups, hopefully). If you want to use Cheese Paper on multiple computers, you will need to sync the files yourself with something like Syncthing, Nextcloud, Google Drive, or Dropbox.

Characters

Character files are a handy place to fill out some information about who is in your story. It's easy to reference whatever notes or information you've written down without leaving the editor.

Worldbuilding

This is almost the same as characters, but for information about the world. This can be places, real or fictional, and as specific as desired. This could also be about organizations or magic systems in your world, if the plot/setting calls for that.

Outline Export

Cheese Paper projects split their contents over a lot of different files. This is wonderful for when you're trying to navigate around a larger project, especially outside of the editor, but makes it annoying to share a high level summary with someone else, particularly if that person is not lucky enough to also be using Cheese Paper.

In this case, you can export a single file that contains all of the notes, summaries, and whatever other information you've included, which can be shared with whoever you want.

Robot with Frustrated Mechanic

Story Summary:

Robot girl who doesn't know how to talk to her cute mechanic, but has specialized hardware and software for dealing with collisions with large stationary objects

The mechanic is really confused why the combat bot keeps asking for the same maintenance that never finds anything wrong, but is too intimidated by how cool and hot the bot is to point it out. Or to ask how the bot keeps hitting these walls. The robot girl is clearly super calm so she must have a plan

Scenes

Visit 1

Notes:

This is almost definitely going to be more than one chapter in reality

Initial falling

Summary:

Amaryllis trips on something on the workshop floor and gets checked out by her mechanic, Rose. Rose says something that can be interpreted in a flirty way, which Amaryllis is super super normal about

Story Export

Cheese Paper combines all of the scenes (that have not explicitly been excluded) into a single file in the outline process. This produces a markdown file, which is then easily transformed into any file format you might desire. Pandoc has a fantastic online tool here, which lets you convert your project to convert markdown to an epub, docx, html, or pdf.

(Side note: if you are distributing a book, please consider not just using PDFs. PDFs can be difficult for readers who need larger font sizes, particularly on smaller devices like phones)

Here is an example of some of the output:

Visit 1

“Okay Lis, all done.”

Amaryllis got a bit of a thrill every time Rose said her name. Sure, she had a massive crush on her mechanic, but it was even deeper than that. And she couldn’t say anything. How would she even start? ‘Hey, I think...