Racira Writing

Manuscript Formatter

Manuscript

text in, text out

Formatted manuscript

Chapter one

“Wait,” she said. The harbour was quiet—too quiet…

* * *

By morning the boat was gone.

Counts

Words
17
Chapters
1
Scene breaks
1
Paragraphs
4
Sentences
3
Characters
101

What changed

  • ·2 quote mark(s) curled
  • ·1 em dash(es)
  • ·1 ellipsis/es
  • ·1 scene break(s) normalised

Standard manuscript format

  • Title page — title, author name and contact details, on its own page.
  • Chapter openings — each chapter starts on a new page, with its heading.
  • Scene breaks — a centred * * * on its own line, never a bare blank line.
  • Curly quotes and dashes — typographic quotes and em dashes, not straight marks.
  • Word count — the whole manuscript, rounded to the nearest thousand for a query.

Scope and limits

Every change is a substitution the tool names: straight quotes to typographic ones, a spaced double hyphen to an em dash, three dots to an ellipsis, and a line of asterisks or hashes to a centred break. Your wording is never rewritten.

This is not a .docx exporter and it does not set fonts, margins or line spacing, which your word processor handles with a template. It formats the text and counts the parts; the checklist above is the rest of the formatting job, done where you submit.

The manuscript formatter applies the mechanical typographic clean-up a submission expects — curly quotes, em dashes, centred scene breaks, an optional title page — and counts the words, chapters and scene breaks.

What is Manuscript Formatter?

A manuscript formatter handles the substitutions a submission expects and nothing more. Paste your text and it converts straight quotes to typographic ones, turns a spaced double hyphen into an em dash, replaces three dots with an ellipsis, and normalises a line of asterisks or hashes into a centred scene break. It can also prepend a title page with your name and contact details. The wording is never rewritten: every change is a substitution the tool names on the page, so you can see exactly what it did.

The list of what it changes is short on purpose. Straight to curly quotes and apostrophes, a double hyphen to an em dash, three dots to an ellipsis, and scene breaks to a centred three-asterisk "* * *" on its own line. Those are the marks that betray a manuscript typed in a plain editor, and fixing them by hand across ninety thousand words is the kind of work that puts off the submission for another week. The tool does not touch spacing between sentences, does not reflow paragraphs and does not "improve" a single word.

Alongside the text it reports the counts an agent or a submission form asks for: the word count, the number of chapters, the number of scene breaks, paragraphs and sentences. The word count here is the whole manuscript's, so it can be given as the rounded figure a query letter uses. The chapter count is read from lines that begin with "chapter", and the scene-break count from the normalised lines, which means the numbers follow the conventions the tool just applied.

Keeping the counts beside the text is deliberate, because a submission form asks for the word count and a synopsis asks for the chapter count, and both are easy to lose track of while a manuscript is being tidied. Because the formatter is deterministic, running it twice on the same text produces the same output and the same counts, so the numbers do not drift between one pass and the next. That matters when a manuscript goes to two markets with slightly different requirements: format the text, note the counts, then adjust only the parts a specific market asks for.

What the manuscript formatter deliberately does not do is the rest of submission formatting. It does not produce a .docx, and it does not set a twelve-point serif font, double line spacing, one-inch margins, a running header or page numbers. Those belong in a word processor template, where they are set once and applied to every submission. The tool's job is the text and the counts; the checklist on the page names the rest of the standard format so nothing is forgotten before you send a manuscript out.

Everything happens in the browser — nothing is uploaded and no draft is stored beyond the tab. The output is plain text you can copy or download, and because the substitutions are deterministic, the same manuscript always produces the same formatted text and the same counts, which is what makes the result checkable rather than merely tidy.

How to use Manuscript Formatter

  1. Paste the manuscript text into the editor.
  2. Turn on the title page and add your title, name and contact details if you want one.
  3. Read the formatted text; each substitution is listed under what changed.
  4. Check the counts: words, chapters and scene breaks.
  5. Copy or download the text, then set fonts and spacing in your word processor.

When to use Manuscript Formatter vs related tools

Use the manuscript formatter when a draft is finished enough to submit and the typographic details need cleaning up. When the question is how two drafts differ rather than how one is typed, the Document Diff Viewer compares them, and for a plain word total the Word Count Tool is quicker than formatting the whole file.

If you are keeping several versions of the manuscript as you tidy it, the Draft Versioning Tool records the word count of each so the changes are visible.

Privacy & Security

This tool runs entirely in your browser — no data ever leaves your device. There is no server round-trip, no upload, no logging, and no account required. Your input is processed locally using client-side JavaScript and is never stored, transmitted, or accessible to anyone else. When you close the tab, everything disappears.

Frequently asked questions about Manuscript Formatter