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The Temporal Page

Your whole story laid out over time — a clean linear outline of every scene, plus charts that show its rhythm, intensity, and recurring threads.

When you're deep in the script, it's easy to lose the shape of the whole thing. The Temporal page is your map of the story from start to finish. It doesn't change your script — it just gives you a few different lenses on the scenes you already have, so you can see the running order at a glance, feel where the energy rises and falls, and spot what's missing.

Open it from the left sidebar in any project: click Temporal (the clock icon).

Note: Nabu used to have separate Outline and Timeline pages. They both live here now. If you click an old link or bookmark to either one, Nabu sends you straight to the Temporal page — nothing is lost, it just lives in one place.

What you'll see

The page is one long view you scroll through, in three stacked sections:

  1. The outline — at the top. A clean, linear list of every scene in order, grouped by act and zone (a labeled stretch of your story, like Setup or Climax). This is your table of contents.
  2. The visualizations — in the middle. Charts of your story's dynamics: how emotional intensity, tension, and pacing move across the script, plus views of where each character and location appears, how your sequences and pages are distributed.
  3. Threads — at the bottom. The promises your story makes — setups, mysteries, arcs — drawn across the same time axis, showing where each one lands.

The header at the top tells you how many scenes the story has and labels the three sections below — outline, dynamics, and threads.

The outline panel

The outline is the heart of this page, and the part you'll use most. It's the same scenes as your script and your board — just listed top to bottom in their running order.

Here's what you can do with it:

  • See the running order. Every scene appears in sequence, grouped under its act and zone, so you can read the spine of the story like a table of contents.
  • Jump to any scene. Click a scene in the outline and Nabu opens it in the script editor, right where you left off in the text.
  • Reorder by dragging. Drag a scene up or down to change where it falls in the story. The change saves and shows up everywhere else — on the board and in the script. You can drag a whole sequence as a group, too.
  • Read the running stats. The outline shows your scene count and an estimated page length, plus small badge counts if Nabu has flagged any errors or warnings in your structure.
  • Restore an omitted scene. If you've set a scene aside, you can bring it back from here.

Note: When you drag a scene, the list updates instantly. If the save doesn't go through for some reason, the scene snaps back to where it was — so the list always reflects what's actually saved.

Giving your story a shape

If your project doesn't have a structure yet — say you started from a blank page — the outline offers to give it one. You'll see a framework chooser (a story template, like a beat sheet) that lays down empty beats and zones for you to fill. Picking one is free and instant; it just scaffolds the shape so you're not staring at nothing.

If your story already has a framework, you'll see a framework picker in the outline header showing which one you're using and how many of its beats you've mapped so far (for example, 8/15 beats mapped) alongside a rough target length.

Note: Depending on your plan, the framework picker may show as a plain label rather than something you can change. If you can't swap frameworks yet, that's expected.

There's a dedicated page on this — see Story frameworks and zones.

The dynamics charts

Scroll past the outline and you reach the dynamics view — charts that show the feel of your story over its length, not just its order.

These curves track things like emotional intensity, tension, and pacing scene by scene, so you can see whether your story builds, sags in the middle, or peaks too early. Alongside them are cross-cut views: which scenes each character is in, where each location is used, how your sequences break up, and how your pages are distributed.

To get fresh tension and pacing curves, run a pacing analysis from the dynamics chart. Nisaba reads through the script and repaints the curves when she's done.

Costs credits: Running a pacing analysis is AI work, so it draws from your credit balance. The amount is approximate — current pricing is shown in the app. See What costs credits.

Tip: A pacing run can take a little while on a long script. You can leave the page and come back — Nabu remembers the run is in progress and updates the charts when it finishes.

Threads

At the bottom is Threads — the promises your story makes and where they land. A thread is anything the script sets running and owes you a return on: a setup, a mystery, a relationship arc, a recurring image. Each one is drawn across the same time axis as everything else on the page, marked at the scenes it touches, so you can see at a glance whether something you care about actually carries through the script or fades after the first act.

Threads appear once Nisaba has read your pages. A project that hasn't had its first pass yet shows a short note here instead — that's normal, not an error.

How this relates to the board

The Temporal page and the board are two views of the same scenes — neither holds a separate copy.

  • The board is your wall of index cards: a free, spatial canvas for rearranging the story by feel, grouping cards into sequences, and sorting them into zones.
  • The outline here is the same scenes as a clean, linear list — better for reading the running order top to bottom and checking the overall length.

A change in one shows up in the other. Reorder a scene in the outline and it moves on the board; move a card on the board and the outline updates. Use whichever view fits what you're doing: the board to shape by feel, the outline to read the spine in order.

Good to know

  • The Temporal page never edits your scene text. Everything here is a view or a reordering — you write and revise the actual words in the script editor.
  • The scene-number lock lives here too. When you're ready to freeze your scene numbers for production, there's a lock toggle in the header — the same one you'll find on the board and in History. Locking blocks reordering until you unlock it.
  • The outline and the old Outline page are the same thing. Any link that used to point at a separate Outline page now opens this page, scrolled to the outline at the top.