Writing status

Patterpad can track how finished each line is, from a first stub to a final, shippable beat. You set a status as you draft and see it at a glance. It’s yours to plan with: it lives in the project’s own files (the source language), never ships to your game, and never touches play. (Where it rolls up into reports lives under Running the project.)

Only line (dialogue) and text (narration) beats carry a status. Game Event beats, the silent cues to your game, are never tracked and never counted in production stats.

The status ladder

A project has an ordered ladder, not-started to done. The default is:

stub → draft 1 → draft 2 → edited → final

(A beat with no status set reads as the lowest stage, stub.)

Two of the stages are readiness thresholds: one marks “ready to record” (everything at that stage or later counts as recordable), one marks “ready to ship”. The production report uses these to tell you how much of the script has crossed each line.

Edit the ladder in Project Settings ▸ Status: rename stages, reorder them, add or remove them, and move the two readiness markers. Each stage carries a colour drawn from your project’s theme, so it adapts on its own to light and dark and to the reading palettes. A beat with no status set reads as the first stage (stub) in the report.

The status ladder in Project Settings. Each stage has a name and a colour; the two Record and Ship radios set the readiness thresholds (here edited = ready to record, final = ready to ship). Reorder stages with the arrows, or add your own.

Setting a status

Patterpad keeps the writing surface calm: the status controls only show when you want them. You set a status in one of three ways:

• Right-click a line or text beat ▸ Status ▸ … sets that one beat. Each option shows its colour, so the ladder reads at a glance.
• Right-click a snippet, group, block, or scene ▸ Status ▸ … flows the status down to every line and text beat inside (game event beats are skipped). It also works on a selection of several snippets, so you can mark a whole run at once.
• The inspector: select a line or text beat and a Writing dropdown appears at the top, tinted to its current stage. Pick a stage; picking the lowest one clears the status (a line with none set reads as the lowest stage).

Seeing status at a glance

While you write, the status stays out of sight. Turn on View ▸ Show Line Status for a small colour badge in the left gutter beside each line, tinted by its stage. It’s a quiet, optional overview: flip it off for a clean page again, and it hides itself in Writing View.

Line status at a glance: coloured badges in the left gutter (STUB, FINAL, EDITED) tint each line by its stage, while the inspector's Writing dropdown (top right) sets the status for the selected beat.

Where it rolls up

Writing status feeds the Production Information report: line counts by stage, scene by scene, and how much has crossed “ready to record” and “ready to ship”. That reporting side lives under Running the project, see Tracking & reports. To list and jump to every line at a given stage while you write, open Review ▸ Find Lines by Status… or switch the search window to its Writing mode.

Recording a scratch take

Voiced projects track a second, separate recording status for each spoken line. Most of that is a producer’s job, but one piece is worth knowing about as a writer: in Audio Folders mode you can record a quick scratch take of a line in your own voice, right at your desk, and hear the scene read back before anyone books a booth. The inspector shows a ● Record button on the line, gives a short 3·2·1 countdown, captures your microphone, and saves the take, no files to shuffle.

The rest of the recording pipeline (the status ladder, audio folders, table-read playback, and the scratch setup) lives under Running the project, see Audio & recording.