ChooseWeaver Help

ChooseWeaver 1.0 · Last updated: October 15, 2026

ChooseWeaver writes stories where the reader decides: every page ends with choices, and every choice turns to another page. This guide covers everything in ChooseWeaver 1.0. Stuck? Write to support@widgetpress.com.

Getting started

ChooseWeaver runs on a Mac with macOS 13 Ventura or later, or a PC with Windows 10 (version 1809 or later) or Windows 11.

1. Choose File > New Story…, give the story a name and pick where to keep it. ChooseWeaver makes a folder of that name for it.
2. Fill in the title and your name, then choose how to begin: Blank story (one empty page 1) or Import from Twine… (see Importing from Twine).
3. Write page 1, add a few choices, and let each one lead to a new page. That is the whole idea.

There is no Save. ChooseWeaver writes every change to disk a moment after you stop typing, and the toolbar shows Saving…, Saved or Not saved. Undo and Redo cover every change to the story.

The window has the toolbar at the top, the cover and pages down the left (the sidebar), the Storyboard or the page you are writing in the middle, and a status bar at the bottom.

Pages and the sidebar

A story is a list of numbered pages, as in a printed gamebook. Page 1 is always where the reader starts. A page's number is its place in the list, so when you move a page the pages renumber, and every choice still leads to the right page.

• Add a page with + Page at the foot of the sidebar or on the Storyboard, or Page > New Page. New pages go at the end of the book.
• Open a page by clicking its thumbnail. The arrow keys move through the pages in order.
• Move a page by dragging its thumbnail, or with Page > Move Up, Move Down or Move to Page…. If the move changes which page is page 1, ChooseWeaver asks first.
• Duplicate copies a page to the end of the book. Delete… asks first, and tells you which choices will be left leading nowhere. The last page can't be deleted.
• Right-click a thumbnail for the same commands.

The sidebar shows the pages in pairs, like an open book, to help you find and move them. It is not a print preview. Coloured dots mark endings, and a small warning mark shows a page with a problem. Drag its edge to make it wider or narrower, or hide it with the toolbar's sidebar button.

Writing a page

The page editor is one quiet column of text. Formatting shows as it will look to readers: bold is bold, a heading is a heading.

The format bar above the text has Bold, Italic, Heading, Subheading, Bulleted list, Numbered list, Quote and Scene break, then Picture… and Sound…. The same commands are in the Format menu. Each button turns its formatting on and off.

• Return (Enter on Windows) starts a new paragraph. Shift+Return starts a new line in the same paragraph, for poems and letters.
• If you know Markdown, it works as a shortcut: # and a space for a heading, ## for a subheading, * or - for a list, 1. for a numbered list, > for a quote, *** alone for a scene break, and **bold** or *italic*.
• Pasting from another app keeps bold, italic, headings, lists and quotes.
• The header above the text has the page's title. It is optional and just for you: it appears on the Storyboard and in menus of pages. Readers see it only as an ending's name in the Endings list.

Press Esc, or click the toolbar's Storyboard button, to go back to the Storyboard. Back and Forward (in the toolbar and the View menu) step through the places you have been.

Choices

Choices always sit at the bottom of the page, drawn as the buttons the reader will tap.

• Click + Choice, type the words (“Open the small door”), then pick where it leads from the menu of pages. New page adds a page at the end and links to it in one step.
• A choice set to Nowhere yet is fine while you write. Check will remind you, and readers never see it.
• Drag a choice by its handle to change the order; the remove button takes it away.
• A page can have up to 9 choices.

The Storyboard

The Storyboard shows the shape of your story: each page is a card and each choice is an arrow to the page it leads to. Open it with the toolbar's Storyboard button or View > Storyboard.

• Drag a card to arrange it. ChooseWeaver remembers where you put it.
• Link two pages by dragging from the handle at the foot of a card to another card. The new choice says “Continue”, ready for you to change.
• Make a new linked page by dragging from a handle and letting go on empty space.
• Open a page by double-clicking its card, or selecting it and pressing Return.
• Remove a choice by clicking its arrow and pressing Delete.
• Page 1's card is tagged Start. A choice that leads nowhere shows as a short dashed line ending in a red ring.

Selecting a card selects its thumbnail too, and the other way round. Page > Show on Storyboard finds a page's card.

Endings

Mark a page as an ending with the Ending menu in the page editor's header, or Page > Ending: Good Ending, Bad Ending or Neutral Ending (Not an Ending undoes it). An ending has no choices; readers see THE END and the kind of ending, with Back and Restart. If the page already has choices, ChooseWeaver asks before removing them.

In the web edition, readers can see how many endings they have found (“Endings: 2 of 5”). Endings they haven't found are never named. The EPUB lists the endings at the back of the book.

Pictures and sound

Each page can have one picture, shown above the text, and one sound.

• Pictures: click Picture… or drop a JPEG, PNG or WebP file (up to 8 MB) on the page. Large pictures are made smaller to suit e-books and print; your original is kept in the story folder. Add a description for readers who can't see the picture. HEIC pictures from a phone need to be exported as JPEG first.
• Sound: click Sound… to add an MP3, M4A or OGG file (up to 8 MB). It plays when the reader opens the page, in the web edition only. MP3 is the safest choice: some Apple devices can't play OGG.

The cover and Story Settings

Click the Cover thumbnail at the top of the sidebar to edit the cover. With no picture, ChooseWeaver makes a plain cover from the title and author. Choose a picture to use your own cover design instead. The cover opens the web edition and the EPUB; for a printed book, your printer needs a separate cover file.

Story Settings (the gear in the status bar, or Settings…) holds the title, author, language, copyright line and an optional dedication, and your ChooseWeaver Unlimited purchase. The words ChooseWeaver adds for readers, such as “Page”, “Back” and “THE END”, are in English in this version.

Search

Click the magnifying glass in the toolbar, or choose Edit > Search…, and type at least two letters. ChooseWeaver searches the text, titles and choice words of every page and lists the matches in page order. Use the arrow keys to move through them, Return to open one, and Esc to close.

Check

While you write, ChooseWeaver checks the story for things a reader would trip over, and marks them on the cards and thumbnails. The status bar shows the count (“No problems” or “3 problems”); click it for the list, and click a problem to go to its page. It points out:

• pages readers can't reach from page 1;
• choices that lead nowhere, or have no words;
• pages with no choices that aren't marked as endings (readers would get stuck);
• empty pages, a story with no ending, and missing picture or sound files;
• characters the print font can't show;
• pictures without a description, and OGG sounds.

Nothing here stops you publishing. It's advice, so you find the loose ends before your readers do.

Play

Click Play in the toolbar to read your story exactly as a reader of the web edition will. Start at picks the page to begin on (the selected page, or page 1), Phone and Desktop change the size, and Restart starts again. Click Stop to go back to writing. Play always starts fresh and doesn't remember where you got to.

Importing from Twine

Choose File > New Story…, then Import from Twine…. ChooseWeaver reads a published Twine 2 story (HTML), a Twine 2 archive, or a Twee file, in the Harlowe, SugarCube, Chapbook or Snowman formats.

• Each passage becomes a page, named after the passage, and the start passage becomes page 1. Each link becomes a choice at the bottom of the page; a link in the middle of a sentence leaves its words in the sentence.
• A passage with no links becomes a neutral ending.
• Bold and italic come across. Macros, variables, scripts, styles, images and sounds don't, because ChooseWeaver stories are pages and choices only; the text inside them is kept.
• Before anything is made, a report lists every change, page by page. Import makes the story; Cancel leaves you a blank story.

Publishing

Click Publish in the toolbar (or File > Publish…). If Check found problems, they are listed first, each linked to its page; you can fix them or choose Publish Anyway. Then pick an edition. When it's done, ChooseWeaver says where it went, with Show in Finder or Show in File Explorer. Your story can be published again whenever you change it.

Web package

A folder holding index.html and your pictures and sounds. Open index.html in any browser, or upload the whole folder to your website. It needs no server and makes no network requests. Readers get Back, Restart, Endings, and the story remembers where they left off.

Choose an empty folder, or one you published to before (ChooseWeaver replaces it). A web page's memory has limits: a private window forgets, Safari forgets a site's saved places after seven days without a visit, and a story embedded on itch.io may not remember.

Web package for itch.io

The same edition as a .zip. On itch.io, create a project, set its kind to HTML, upload the zip and tick “This file will be played in the browser”.

EPUB, for Kindle, Apple Books and other e-readers

One .epub file. Every choice is a link: tap it and the reader turns to its page. Sounds are left out.

• Kindle: send the file to your Kindle with Amazon's Send to Kindle, or upload it to Kindle Direct Publishing to sell it.
• Apple Books: open the file on your Mac to add it to Books, which syncs it to your iPhone and iPad. To sell it, upload it through Apple Books for Authors.
• Any other EPUB 3 reader opens it as well.

Print PDF

A book interior at 6 × 9 inches, ready for a print-on-demand service such as KDP Print. Each choice ends with “turn to page N”, and N is the number printed on that page of the paper book. Page 1 starts on a right-hand page. A long story page can run onto a second printed page, so printed numbers may run ahead of your page numbers; ChooseWeaver works the numbers out for you.

• ChooseWeaver tells you the printed page count. KDP Print takes 6 × 9 books of 24 to 828 pages.
• The PDF has no cover; your printer's cover tools make one.
• Colour pictures stay in colour, and a colour interior costs more to print.
• Print supports Latin, Greek and Cyrillic text. If a page uses characters the print font can't show, Check and the Print PDF row name them.

Free version and Unlimited

ChooseWeaver is free to download, and the free version does everything: write, import, play, check and publish. It publishes stories of up to 5 pages, the cover not counted, in every edition.

ChooseWeaver Unlimited publishes stories of any length. It is $29.99, once: no subscription, no account. Buy it from Upgrade to Unlimited… (on the Mac, in the ChooseWeaver menu; on Windows, in the Help menu), from Story Settings, or from the Publish sheet.

Writing is never limited, and a story is never cut short. A longer story is all there, ready to publish when you upgrade.

New computer, or reinstalled? Sign in to the App Store or Microsoft Store with the same account and choose Restore Purchases (ChooseWeaver menu on the Mac, Help menu on Windows).

You own your stories, and may give them away or sell them, in any edition, with no royalty.

Your stories and the licence

Your story is yours. Its words, choices, pictures, sounds and cover belong to you, and Widget Press claims no rights in them. You may sell your story or give it away, in any edition, with no royalty or revenue share. You are responsible for having the rights to everything in it, including anything you import from Twine.

The EPUB and the print PDF carry no ChooseWeaver program and are entirely yours, including the words ChooseWeaver adds, such as “turn to page”, “THE END” and “Made with ChooseWeaver”, which you may use and change with your story. Their fonts are used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

The web package includes ChooseWeaver's reader: the program and stylesheet in index.html and the two icons. Widget Press licenses it to you, royalty-free, to distribute with your story: host it on any website or on itch.io, or include it in your own app or product for any store. This is the same in the free version and in Unlimited.

• You may change the stylesheet in index.html, replace the two icons with your own, correct your story's words in index.html, and add your own files and pages beside the package.
• You may not change the reader program; add pages or choices by editing the package (add them in ChooseWeaver and publish again); use the reader on its own or with a story ChooseWeaver didn't publish; extract it to build another writing tool, reader or service; or remove NOTICES.txt or the copyright notices.

No credit required. You don't have to mention ChooseWeaver anywhere. The licence gives no right to use the ChooseWeaver or Widget Press names and logos beyond what ChooseWeaver itself puts in the package, and your story mustn't suggest that Widget Press endorses it.

This is a summary. The full text, the ChooseWeaver Reader License 1.0, is in NOTICES.txt in every web package, and covers the reader that package was published with.

Where your stories live

A story is an ordinary folder, wherever you saved it, named after the story. Inside are:

• <Name>.cwstory: double-click it to open the story;
• story.json: the words and the shape of the story;
• media/: your pictures and sounds.

You can open a story with File > Open Story… or from Open Recent. On the Mac, the first time you open a story by double-clicking it, macOS asks once for permission to use its folder: choose the folder it shows and click Allow.

Backing up. Copy the folder, or keep it in a backup or sync folder like any other. To make one file of it, for a backup or to send, choose File > Export Story Archive…; it saves the whole story as a .zip. To use it again, unzip it and double-click the .cwstory file inside.

If the story file is changed outside ChooseWeaver while it is open (by a sync service on another computer, for example), ChooseWeaver never writes over it: it asks which version to keep and saves a copy of the other.

Privacy

Your stories stay on your computer. ChooseWeaver has no account, no analytics and no crash reports, and never sends your stories anywhere. It goes online only to talk to the App Store or Microsoft Store about your purchase, and to send feedback when you choose Help > Provide Feedback… and press Send. The editions you publish make no network requests either. See the privacy policy.

Keyboard shortcuts

In the sidebar and on the Storyboard, the arrow keys move through the pages in order, Return opens the selected page, and Delete or Backspace deletes it (after asking).

Getting help

Write to support@widgetpress.com. A person reads every message, usually within two working days. Tell us what you did, what you expected and what happened, and which version you have. If you can, attach the story, made into one file with File > Export Story Archive…. The Support page has answers to common questions, purchases and refunds.

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