CkWriter

A local, LaTeX-aware book-writing companion built in Rust + egui, with character/location hover info from a per-book JSON database and three coaching pipelines (voice, show-don't-tell, prose) backed by a local Ollama model.

Built as a sister project to CkEditor; designed specifically for Carlos Kelkboom's The Redemption Chronicles.

What it does

• Opens a LaTeX book directory (one with main.tex using \include{...} for chapters).
• Shows the chapter list (in \include{} order plus loose .tex files greyed out).
• Edits chapter .tex files in place. Ctrl+S saves.
• Recognises character and location names from Info/Characters/*.json and Info/Locations/*.json, underlines them in the prose, and shows a tooltip card on hover.
• Right panel: in-scope characters and locations for the current chapter (sorted by frequency), with an inline inspector to edit name / role / age / tone / voice notes / aliases.
• Bottom AI panel: three buttons (voice, show, don't tell, prose) stream Gemma's structured-JSON suggestions, anchor each one to a span of prose, render colored squiggles in the editor, and offer Accept / Dismiss in a sidebar.
• The system prompt sent to the LLM is built from your own Info/Writing Assistant/voice-system-prompt.md plus the tail of Info/World Building/Plot.txt (roadmap), plus per-character voice notes for everyone in the current scene.

Database layout (per-book)

<book>/
  main.tex
  Ancient/, Modern/                       chapter .tex files
  Info/
    index.json                            optional book config (model, prompt paths)
    Characters/<slug>.json
    Locations/<slug>.json
    Events/<slug>.json
    Timeline/<slug>.json
    Writing Assistant/
      voice-system-prompt.md              loaded into LLM system prompt
    World Building/
      Plot.txt                            tail loaded as roadmap

Per-entity JSON schema (all fields optional except id and name):

{
  "id": "amenophis",
  "name": "Amenophis",
  "aliases": ["Deina", "Lady Amenophis"],
  "role": "Higher Being, warrior",
  "age": "ancient",
  "tone": "commanding, reflective",
  "voice_notes": "speaks rarely; when she does, it lands.",
  "relations": [{ "kind": "ward", "id": "nefar" }],
  "first_seen": "Ancient/001_Wua",
  "tags": ["higher-being", "ancient-arc"],
  "free_text": "..."
}

The first time you open a book that has a Info/Characters/Personae.txt, the right panel offers a one-click Import from Personae.txt button to seed the database. Idempotent — never overwrites existing JSON.

Running

cargo run --release

A welcome dialog asks for the book root. Defaults to ~/Projects/TheRedemptionChronicles. Recent books persist in ~/.config/ckwriter/settings.toml.

Configuration

~/.config/ckwriter/settings.toml (auto-created):

model = "gemma4:latest"
ollama_url = "http://localhost:11434"
editor_font_size = 16.0
recent_books = []

Per-book override at <book>/Info/index.json:

{ "model": "gemma4:latest" }

Keyboard

• Ctrl+S — save current chapter
• Ctrl+Shift+S — save chapter notes scratchpad

Status

v1. Light on quality gates by design (cargo fmt and default cargo clippy only).

Not yet

• Candidate proper-noun finder ("?" tab for unknown capitalised words)
• File watcher for external (Overleaf) edits
• Settings UI panel
• Vim mode / syntect highlighting (using plain egui::TextEdit for v1)
• Multi-book tabs
• Persisted revision history
• PDF/EPUB export — keep using latexmk / Overleaf for that