Book and Article Titles
Every project has a Book Details page (Article Details for articles), reached from the top of the chapter list under Front Matter. This is where the title-page information lives.
Each entry here is a variable — a named piece of information that the template drops into the title page, running heads, and the ePub metadata. Which variables appear by default depends on the template you chose; a typical book starts with Title, Short Title, and Author.
Authors and editors
Author is a list, not a single field. Click Add Author for each additional author; use the red × beside a name to remove it. If your template includes editors, an Editor list works the same way, with its own Add Editor button.
The caret beside each name opens that person's detail fields, so a name can carry more than just its display form where the template needs it.
Adding your own variables
Click Add Variable, give it a name, and click Create. The new variable appears in the list with its own text box.
This page is where a variable comes into being. A name that is not here yet cannot be dropped into the text, so start here and then go and use it.
Custom variables are useful for anything the template does not already cover — a series name, a volume number, an ISBN, a dedication, an epigraph. Once defined, a variable can be dropped anywhere in the text with the Insert Variable button on the toolbar — switch on Tools → Boilerplate if you do not see it — or into headers and footers when you edit the header template, so you only have to type the value once.
Inkwell will not let you reuse a name it already fills in itself. Book Title, Chapter Title, Part Title and Page Number belong to running heads and margin marks, and the author fields come from the Author list above rather than from a variable.
Variables in the text
A variable in the text is a chip: a single object with a dashed border, not editable text. Click it and it is selected whole — type to replace it with your own words, or press Backspace to remove it. Its name is not something you can edit where it sits; to use a different variable, click the chip and pick one from Insert Variable.
That is deliberate. The chip shows the variable's name, which sits where the reader will eventually see its value, and typing over a name rather than replacing the chip is an easy mistake to make and a quiet one to live with — the renamed variable simply has no value, and whatever you typed never reaches the page.
Removing a variable
Each variable has an X button beside its label. It is disabled while the variable is still used somewhere — in a chapter, or in a running head or margin mark — and hovering over it tells you so ("Used in the document — remove it from the document first"). Remove the usages first, then the variable.
Where this information ends up
Everything on this page feeds the built book: the title page as laid out by the template, running heads that reference the short title or author, and the metadata embedded in the ePub so that e-readers and stores show the right title and author.