Inline comments

Inline comments let you leave a note pinned to the exact passage it is about. They sit beside your writing, never inside it, so they stay out of anything you publish. They also stay out of anything you export: comments belong to the readers who wrote them, so they are not carried into a file you might send elsewhere. Reading inline comments is free for everyone. Leaving one is a Pro feature, and your Pro trial counts.

Comments are different from the notes you leave yourself. A note is private and only you ever see it. A comment is part of a conversation on the piece, shown as a soft yellow highlight on the words it points to, so it reads differently from the blue of a private note.

Leaving a comment

Select the words you want to comment on. A small toolbar appears over the selection with a speech-bubble button. Choose it, type your comment, and post. The passage picks up a yellow highlight, and the comment appears in the comments panel. You can add a GIF to a comment or reply with the GIF button below the box.

You can open the panel any time from the More menu in the toolbar. It lists every comment on the piece. Selecting the quoted line at the top of a comment jumps the editor to that spot and brightens the highlight, so it is easy to find what a comment is talking about even in a long piece.

This works in the other direction too. Click or tap a yellow highlight in the prose and the comments panel opens with that comment brought into view. The blue highlight of a private note does the same with your notes panel. If a passage carries both, the comment wins the click, since a conversation is usually the thing you want to see; the note is still right there in the notes panel.

If you edit the writing later, a comment whose passage has moved or changed stops showing its highlight rather than pointing at the wrong words. The comment itself stays in the panel with the text it was first attached to, so nothing is lost.

Replies

A comment can hold a short back-and-forth. Choose Reply under a comment and your response lands underneath it, kept with the comment it answers instead of starting a separate thread. Replies go one level deep, which keeps a conversation readable.

Editing and deleting

You can edit your own comment for fifteen minutes after you post it. After that the wording is settled and the body is locked, though you can still reply and resolve.

You can delete your own comments at any time. If you are the author of the piece, you can also delete any comment on it. Deleting is recoverable, so a comment is set aside rather than erased.

Marking a comment resolved

When a comment has been dealt with, the author of the piece can mark it resolved. A resolved comment does not disappear. It steps back, dimmed, and drops its highlight so it stops competing for attention. Resolved comments are tucked behind a Show resolved toggle at the bottom of the panel, and you can reopen one whenever you want to look at it again.

Turning comments on or off

You decide whether a piece takes comments. In the comments panel, the author has a single Allow comments on this piece switch. Turning it off keeps every existing comment exactly where it is and only stops new ones from being added. Turn it back on whenever you like.

A note on what is allowed

Comments pass through the same content checks as the rest of the site. A comment that trips a check is held for review before it appears to others, the same way a feed comment would be.

Notes from a feedback read

When someone reads your piece through the feedback queue, the inline notes they leave now appear in the comments panel too, under Notes from your feedback reads, each one quoting the passage it is about. You no longer have to keep the feedback open in one tab and the paragraph in another.

Three things about them are different from an ordinary comment, and all three are deliberate:

• The reader has no name on them. Feedback on Inkbreaker is anonymous in both directions, and that does not change because the note moved to a different screen.
• You can hide one, but not edit it. Once you have dealt with a note you can hide it from the editor so it is not in your way for ever. It stays in the full read either way, so nothing is lost and you can go back to it. What you cannot do is change what a reader said while it is still attributed to them.
• Nobody gained access to your document. The reader is not a collaborator, cannot see your draft, and nothing about your piece was shared with them. They read what you sent them, and this is their reply arriving where it is useful.

Only notes from a read that has actually been delivered show up here, and only the writer sees them.

Going further

A comment is for talking about the work. When you want to propose a specific edit rather than describe one, that is track changes, where a collaborator suggests edits the author can accept or reject.