USER MANUAL · DOCUMENTS

Gantt, timeline, pyramid, quadrant

A document is a Gantt chart, a timeline, a pyramid or a quadrant. It sits in the rail beside your canvases and shares everything a canvas has except live health and flows: every save is a version you can compare and restore, collaborators edit it live, comments attach to its items, share links and presentations show it read-only, and Export writes it as PNG, SVG or PDF in the theme you are looking at. The point is that a plan pasted into a slide is stale the week after; a document here is the plan itself, kept current by whoever owns it.

Creating one

  • New canvas in the rail asks What to draw first, and offers six choices: the C4 model, a sequence (a C4 model opened in a flow's sequence view, not a document), a Gantt chart, a timeline, a pyramid or a quadrant. Then comes Start from: a starter template, or a blank one. The first-run page offers the same starting points.
  • From your own AI, create_canvas takes a kind and, optionally, the document in its text form (see below). See MCP.

Editing

  • Nothing is dragged. Edit opens the outline and the inspector on the right: the outline lists the items in order (Add, reorder with the arrows or Alt+↑/↓), the inspector edits the selected item's fields, and the drawing lays itself out from those fields — dates, values, positions.
  • With nothing selected, the inspector shows the document's settings: the Gantt's axis unit and today marker, the timeline's axis label, the pyramid's orientation, the quadrant's axis titles and quadrant names.
  • ⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z undo and redo, ⌘S saves, and an unsaved draft survives a refresh, exactly as on a canvas. Save writes a version; History and Diff work item by item, with removed items drawn as ghosts.
  • One item per document can carry the accent: the milestone that matters, the level to read first. Tags on items feed the rail's tag filter, which hides items and closes the gaps they leave.

The four kinds

  • Gantt chart. Tasks with a start and an end on a date axis (days, weeks or months), banded into lanes, with milestones, progress, dependencies drawn as rounded connectors, and an optional today marker.
  • Timeline. Dated events on one axis. When the dates are real dates the axis is to scale; when they are labels such as “Q3 2026” the events are evenly spaced. An event can span a range and be a milestone.
  • Pyramid. Four to six levels, widest at the base (or the top, if you flip it), each with a name, a description and an optional value.
  • Quadrant. Items placed by two numbers from 0 to 1 on a 2×2 with titled axes and named quadrants; one quadrant can be the focal one.

Text form, the assistant and your own AI

  • Every kind has a text form: Mermaid's gantt, timeline and quadrantChart, and a C4Stage pyramid block. Import text (while editing) replaces the draft from a pasted block; Copy Mermaid in the Export menu hands the current document back out.
  • The assistant works on a document in that form: ask for a change and it re-emits the whole block, which lands as your draft to save or discard. Items keep their ids, so comments and walkthrough stops stay attached.
  • Over MCP, get_canvas returns a document with its text, and set_document takes the whole text back and saves a version. Each call is one AI action.

Walkthroughs

  • A walkthrough is the document's counterpart of a flow: named stops over the items, each with a caption. Play one from the rail or the Walkthroughs pill; the item at the current stop is lit and everything else dims; ← / → step, Esc exits. A walkthrough rides the URL, and viewers of a presentation follow it live.
  • Walkthroughs currently come with the starter templates or through the API; authoring them in the inspector is next.