Folio
Restraint → creative flow. Anti-slop infrastructure for children's literature.
Folio is a local-first studio for writers of read-aloud picture books. It shows how a manuscript is built — the words a child encounters, the sounds they hear, and the rhythm an adult reads aloud — without turning those ingredients into a quality score.
The engine measures. It does not author. Folio will never generate manuscript text or illustrations on your behalf. The thesis: when the boring legibility work becomes legible in the background, creative flow has more room.
Who it's for
- Picture-book authors Compose one facing spread at a time while the Draft, Listen, and Language lenses reveal pacing, vocabulary, rhyme, rhythm, sentence shape, and phoneme structure. The editor MVP is centered on board and picture books for ages 0–7; the engine still accepts longer work.
- Speech-language pathologists The phoneme-acquisition norms in the engine come from Crowe & McLeod (2020), AJSLP — the same research base SLPs already use clinically. Select any phoneme in Language to highlight every word containing it across the whole manuscript. Useful for evaluating whether a candidate text fits a client's current phoneme inventory, or for designing intervention materials with controlled sound load.
What's in the editor
- Facing-spread carousel Write one two-page spread at a time, with independent text and illustration placement on each page. The book-shape strip keeps all 16 spreads visible and shows relative language density.
- Rich text Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough via Lexical. Floating toolbar on selection. Markdown shortcuts as you type (
**bold**,*italic*,~~strike~~). Soft hyphen and non-breaking space via keyboard. - Draft lens A few evidence-backed reflections about changes in density, vocabulary, sound, and flow. Reflections can take you directly to the affected spread.
- Listen and Language lenses Rehearse rhyme, meter, and line shape; then inspect familiar and reach vocabulary, sentence types, pronunciation provenance, and the manuscript's clickable phoneme palette.
- In-context highlighting The writing canvas stays visually clean by default. Select a phoneme in Language to temporarily highlight every word that carries it, using the CSS Custom Highlight API with no DOM mutation or caret disruption.
- Local-first manuscript tools Lossless rich-text autosave, multiple local manuscripts, blank structural templates, read-only authored/public-domain examples, per-page composition, and export to plain text, Markdown, or print/PDF.
Your privacy
Folio runs entirely in your browser. Your manuscript content never leaves your device — no server roundtrip, no account, no analytics about what you write.
Your draft autosaves to this browser's local storage and persists across page reloads. The Clear removes it. Anonymous page-view counts are recorded via Plausible — cookieless, no personal identifiers, no cross-site tracking.
What's coming
- Selection-scoped reflections and richer evidence navigation
- Separating reach words into rich literary vocabulary vs. genuinely rare words
- Dialogic-reading prompt suggestions
- Per-client phoneme acquisition profiles for SLP workflows