Radial timeline

Radial Timeline™

by Eric Rhys Taylor

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What It Does

Radial Timeline™ arranges your scenes by act, subplot, narrative or chronological order in a striking radial layout—revealing the structure, rhythm, and scope of your story. Each ring represents a subplot; hover interactions surface important details like scene synopsis and AI story pulses. Scenes highlight across subplots to show interrelationships. Multiple view modes present your novel like an X-ray.

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Before: Scrolling through line after line of spreadsheet tables and files, losing sight of how your B-plot interweaves with the main storyline.

After: One visual map showing every scene, every subplot, color coded and ordered in context and connected to the big picture.

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Radial Timeline™ captures and visualizes all 4 critical timelines, revealing your manuscript's evolution from the nucleus of an idea to the final polished novel.

1. Narrative time: the sequence you reveal events to readers.
2. Chronological time: when events happen in your story's world. (Includes Planetary Time calculator for sci-fi/fantasy calendars).
3. Author time: your scene writing progress with target completion dates from Todo to Complete.
4. Publishing time: manuscript revision stages from Zero draft through Press-ready.

Narrative and Chronologue modes keep subplot colors front-and-center so you can compare structure without workflow noise. When you need to see Todo/Working/Overdue status or publish stage colors, jump into Publication Mode (formerly Subplot Mode), where the All Scenes outer ring is replaced by Main Plot and scenes inherit the author-status and publish-stage palette.

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Docs (How-to & setup)

If you want the “how-to” details (setup, sets, properties, reordering, advanced options), they live in the wiki:

• Wiki Home
• How-to
• Settings
• Commands
• YAML Frontmatter

Sets, Properties, and Templates

• Sets define the structural fields used in your notes.
• Properties are custom metadata fields added to notes.
• Presets are starter configurations for campaigns or workflows.
• Templates are used only for export formatting (e.g., Pandoc).

Plan your novel with radial timeline in obsidian
Complete author walkthrough & setup guide

YouTube Video Suite

Ongoing series on the Radial Timeline YouTube channel:

• Volume 1 — Intro: Original home page intro video
• Volume 2 — Chronologue Mode: Chronologue Mode Volume 2
• Volume 3 — Release 6 Overview: Overview of New Features
• Volume 4 — Inquiry View: Inquiry View Volume 4
• Volume 5 — Author Progress Report (APR): Author Progress Report (APR) Volume 5
• Volume 6 — Gossamer Mode: Gossamer Mode Volume 6

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Installation

From Obsidian

1. Open settings → community plugins.
2. Click browse and search for "radial timeline".
3. Click install and then enable.

Manual installation

1. Download the latest main.js, styles.css, and manifest.json from the releases page.
2. Extract the files to your vault's .obsidian/plugins/radial-timeline (may be hidden by file system)

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Known Conflicts

• Plugin Conflicts: If you experience visual glitches or strange behavior (such as the timeline overlapping with other UI elements), it may be due to a conflict with another plugin. Try disabling other plugins to isolate the issue. Please see known plugin conflicts.

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Technical Notes

Screen Resolution

The radial timeline is designed for high pixel density displays (around 200 ppi or higher) for optimal visual quality.

• All Apple Retina displays — 2x pixel density.
• Recommend Windows systems with 4k displays or higher. (Tested down to 1440p 2560x1440)
• Tablets.

If you're experiencing visual quality issues on Windows, please check your display scaling settings.

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Acknowledgments

• 04 Font by Yuji Oshimoto — Japanese freeware font. © 1998–2003 Yuji Oshimoto. 04.jp.org
• d3.js — data-driven SVG visualizations.
• Hero Patterns by Steve Schoger — SVG motifs used in the Working-status scene fill, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
• Obsidian — for a thriving plugin ecosystem and thoughtful feature development.
• Save the Cat! Writes a Novel (2018), Jessica Brody — a practical articulation of the Save the Cat beats.
• The Story Grid, Shawn Coyne — a rigorous methodology for analyzing scenes and beat flow.
• W3C SVG specification — for making vector graphics on the web dependable.

Bundled fonts (PDF export)

• Latin Modern Roman — used for the Signature template.
• Sorts Mill Goudy by Barry Schwartz — used for the Professional template.
• Source Serif 4 by Frank Grießhammer — used for the Standard template.
• Arial — used for the Basic template.

All bundled fonts ship with their original license files in assets/fonts/.

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Feedback and support

Check out the Discussions group at Discussions. If you encounter issues or have feature requests, please file an issue on the Github Repository Issues page.

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Author

Created by Eric Rhys Taylor

Reviewed and approved for the Obsidian Community Plugins directory. Developed with best practices in mind.

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License & Intellectual Property

Radial Timeline™ © 2025 Eric Rhys Taylor
Released under the Radial Timeline Source-Available Non-Commercial License.

• You may install and use the software for personal, educational, or professional creative work.
• You may use the software to create commercial creative works such as books, scripts, outlines, and related authored content.
• Redistribution, public forks, hosted versions, and commercial exploitation of the software itself are prohibited without written permission.
• The "Radial Timeline" name is a trademark of Eric Rhys Taylor.

See the License and Notice pages for full details.

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Disclaimer & Limitation of Liability

This software is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, express or implied. The author makes no guarantees regarding performance, reliability, or compatibility with third-party plugins, APIs, or services.