Creating a New Project

Click New Project at the top of your projects list.

Title and kind

Give the project a Title — you can change it later — and choose a Kind:

• Note — a single piece of writing with no chapter structure.
• Article — divided into sections, for papers and essays.
• Book — divided into chapters, with front and back matter.

The kind decides the vocabulary used throughout the editor and which structural features are available, so pick the one that matches what you are writing.

Template

Select beside Template opens the template picker. A template supplies the page size, fonts, heading styles, and standard front and back matter — it is the difference between a manuscript that looks typeset and one that does not.

You can change the template later, so this is not a decision you have to get right now. See Templates and Boilerplate.

Starting from scratch

To write everything in Inkwell, leave Content empty and click Start.

Starting from existing files

If you already have a draft, Import Document brings it in. The button offers four sources:

• Upload File — a file from your computer: Word, ODT, LaTeX, Markdown, ePub, RTF, or plain text.
• Import from Google Docs — pick a document straight from Google Drive.
• Import from Inkwell — an .inkwell backup.
• Import from Template — a chapter out of one of the templates.

Click Import Document as many times as you need; each file becomes a chapter. If you upload a single file, Inkwell splits it into chapters at its headings and shows you what it found, so a whole book in one Word file arrives correctly divided.

The red X beside a chapter removes it from the list. When the chapter list looks right, click Start.

How you format the original document makes a large difference to how well this works — see Prepare Your Document for Importing into Inkwell before importing anything substantial.