Advanced Formatting Features

The toolbar carries a number of tools that do not come up every day but solve specific typesetting problems.

Because they come up rarely, some of them are put away by default. Vertical Spacer, Page Break and Prevent Breaking appear once you switch on Tools → Page Layout; Insert Variable appears with Tools → Boilerplate. Both are your own settings rather than the project's, so they follow you from book to book and your collaborators keep their own.

Putting a button away changes nothing about the book itself. Spacers, page breaks, unbreakable spans and variables already in the manuscript keep working — they still display in the editor, still typeset, and can still be selected and deleted. You just cannot insert a new one until you switch the buttons back on.

Clear Formatting

Strips character formatting — bold, italic, custom text styles — from the selection, leaving the text and its paragraph style alone. The quickest way to normalise text pasted in from somewhere else.

Text styles

Beside the paragraph-style dropdown is a text style dropdown. Where a paragraph style governs a whole paragraph, a text style is a named character style you apply to a selection — a font for quotations, a colour, a highlight.

Choose (New Text Style) at the bottom of the dropdown to define one. Defining a style rather than formatting by hand means you can restyle every use of it later from Project Settings → Custom Text Styles.

Insert Document Property

Drops a live reference to one of the book's own properties into the text: Short Title, Subtitle, or Author. Change the value on the details page and every reference updates.

Insert Variable

Shown when Tools → Boilerplate is on.

The same idea for the variables you define yourself, plus the built-ins: Number, Title, Subtitle, Author, and Page Number. New Variable creates one without leaving the editor.

Variables are what make running heads and repeated title-page information maintainable — see Book and Article Titles.

Insert Comment

Adds a comment anchored to the selection. Comments annotate the text without changing it, and can be resolved once dealt with. See Collaboration.

There is also a Comment (In Document) paragraph style, which is a different thing: it renders the paragraph grey and italic in the editor and leaves it out of the built book. Use it for notes to yourself in the flow of the text.

Vertical Spacer

Shown when Tools → Page Layout is on.

Inserts an expanding vertical space. It grows to fill whatever room is left on the page, so it is the tool for centring an element vertically or pushing content to the bottom of a page.

Page Break

Shown when Tools → Page Layout is on.

Forces the following content onto a new page.

Prevent Breaking

Shown when Tools → Page Layout is on.

Marks the selection as unbreakable, so Inkwell will not split it across a line or page boundary. Use it on things that must stay together: a name and its initials, a number and its unit, a scripture reference.

Insert Symbol

Opens a table of characters that are awkward to type. Clicking one drops it in at the cursor.

The first two are ordinary punctuation:

• En Dash (–) — number ranges, 1914–18.
• Em Dash (—) — the parenthetical dash. Typing -- produces one without opening this dialog; see Keyboard Shortcuts.

The rest are spaces and invisible controls, listed here in the order the dialog shows them. The middle column is the label on the button, and it is also what you will see in the editor once the character is in your text — an invisible character would otherwise be impossible to find again.

Character	Button	What it is for
No-Break Space	NBSP	A space that will never break across a line: Mrs Dalloway, 10 km.
Soft Hyphen	SHY	An invisible hint that a word may be hyphenated here. The hyphen appears only if the line actually breaks there.
Zero Width Space	ZWSP	Allows a break with no visible space — a long URL, or a compound word.
Zero Width Non-Joiner	ZWNJ	Stops two letters joining or forming a ligature.
Zero Width Joiner	ZWJ	Forces a join where the script would not otherwise make one.
En Quad	ENQ	Half an em wide.
Em Quad	EMQ	One em wide.
En Space	ENSP	Half an em wide.
Em Space	EMSP	One em wide.
Three-Per-Em Space	3EMSP	A third of an em, the traditional thick space.
Four-Per-Em Space	4EMSP	A quarter of an em, the mid space.
Six-Per-Em Space	6EMSP	A sixth of an em.
Figure Space	FIGSP	Exactly as wide as a digit, so columns of figures line up.
Punctuation Space	PUNSP	As wide as a full stop.
Thin Space	THSP	A fifth of an em — between nested quotation marks, or before a unit.
Hair Space	HRSP	The narrowest space there is.
Narrow No-Break Space	NNBSP	Thin and unbreakable: 20 000, or inside French guillemets.
Medium Mathematical Space	MMSP	The spacing used around mathematical operators.
Ideographic Space	IDSP	Full width, to match Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters.

Any of these characters that arrives by paste is shown the same way, so text brought in from elsewhere does not hide them. To get rid of them wholesale rather than one at a time, see Remove Soft Hyphens and Eliminate Unusual Spaces under Cleanup in Tools.

Mathematics has its own Insert Symbol, which is a different dialog holding mathematical symbols rather than these.

Change Case

Converts the selection to Title Case, UPPERCASE, lowercase, or Sentence case.