Draft Bench

Draft Bench is a writing plugin for novelists working in Obsidian. It manages the manuscript spine — projects, chapters, scenes, drafts, and compile — as first-class note types in your vault, using the frontmatter conventions Obsidian writers already know.

The plugin stays narrow on purpose. Plot grids, character databases, beat-sheet templates, and pacing analytics live elsewhere. Draft Bench handles the structural editing of a manuscript: organizing scenes into chapters, snapshotting drafts at any point, and compiling the finished work to Markdown, PDF, ODT, or DOCX.

What it does

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• Projects, chapters, scenes, drafts, and compile presets are notes. Every Draft Bench artifact is a regular markdown file with dbench- frontmatter properties. A vault opened without the plugin still reads cleanly: scenes are notes, drafts are notes, presets are notes. Nothing is locked behind plugin-only state.
• Manuscript Builder. A workspace view that lists chapters and scenes for a selected project, in dbench-order. Word-count rollups per chapter and per project. Status chips per scene. Reorder via the Reorder Scenes / Reorder Chapters modals. Click a scene title to open the file; collapse a chapter to focus elsewhere.
• Drafts as a first-class type. Snapshots of scenes, chapters, or single-scene projects, stored in a configurable Drafts/ folder. Capture the state of the work at any moment — before a major revision, after a workshop session, when a beat finally lands. Drafts are notes, so they’re searchable, taggable, and Bases-queryable like everything else.
• Compile presets are notes too. A preset is a dbench-type: compile-preset note in your vault, with content-handling rules (frontmatter strip, heading scope, footnote renumbering, embed handling, dinkus normalization) editable in the Properties panel or the Compile tab. Multiple presets per project — one for workshop submission, one for the agent draft, one for the final manuscript file.
• Bidirectional linking with integrity service. Stable IDs, plugin-maintained reverse arrays, live sync on vault events, and a batch-repair UI for the cases that drift. SNAKE_CASE issue codes so the same problem reads the same way every time.
• Bases-native discovery. Starter .base views for projects, scenes, and drafts. Filter, group, and surface your manuscript with the same Bases setup you use for everything else in your vault.
• Theme-respectful styling. Class hooks and minimum defaults, opt-in via Style Settings. The plugin doesn’t impose chrome on writers who customize their vault’s appearance.

Where it sits

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Draft Bench is one of several Obsidian writing plugins. The closest spiritual ancestor is Longform; the plugin’s Drafts/ and compile concepts owe a real debt to Longform’s prior art. The closest contemporary is StoryLine, a much broader Scrivener-in-Obsidian that handles plotting, characters, locations, timelines, and analytics in addition to the manuscript.

Draft Bench’s scope is deliberately smaller. The narrative spine, well, and nothing else. Auxiliary content — characters, locations, research notes — stays user-managed in plain markdown, or moves to the sibling Charted Roots plugin which owns world-building. Two focused plugins, one shared vault.

For a longer comparison, see How Draft Bench compares.

Status

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Draft Bench is in active pre-V1 development. The plugin is not yet installable; the source repository is private until V1.

V1 ships:

• Project, chapter, scene, draft, and compile-preset note types
• Manuscript Builder with chapter and scene cards, word-count rollups, status chips
• Drafts as snapshots of scenes, chapters, or single-scene projects
• Compile to Markdown, PDF, ODT, and DOCX with per-preset content-handling overrides
• Bidirectional linking + integrity service with batch repair
• Bases-native starter views for projects, scenes, and drafts
• Style Settings integration for opt-in theming

Public BRAT release lands with V1. Until then, this site is the canonical place to follow what’s coming.