Managing Chapters

The list down the left of the editor is your project's structure. Click any entry to open it. If the list is hidden, bring it back with the Chapters button on the left rail:

If you are working on an article rather than a book, the same list shows sections instead of chapters. The rest of this tutorial says "chapter"; read "section" for articles.

The list is divided into Front Matter, Body, Appendices, and Back Matter, with the details page (and the template page, when that is switched on) pinned at the top. The Appendices heading appears once the project has an appendix in it.

Inserting a chapter

Click Insert at the bottom of the list.

The menu is in three groups.

New content

• Blank Chapter — an empty chapter.
• New Part — a part divider, for grouping chapters into Part I, Part II, and so on. See Chapter Titles, Parts, and Section Headings.
• New Page — a standalone page, for front matter such as a dedication.
• New Appendix — an appendix, added to the Appendices section after the body. See Chapter Titles, Parts, and Section Headings.

New content lands directly after the chapter you have open, so you add a chapter where you are working rather than at the far end of the list. If what you have open belongs somewhere else — you ask for an appendix while reading a body chapter, or have a generated section such as the table of contents open — the new chapter goes to the end of its own section instead.

Import

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

Generated sections. These build themselves from the rest of the book, so you add them once and Inkwell keeps them up to date:

• Index — see Index.
• Bibliography — every work you have cited.
• Notes — the endnotes section.
• Annotations — the second, independent family of notes; see Annotations.
• Table of Contents — see Table of Contents.
• List of Figures — every captioned figure, with its page number.

At the bottom of the menu, Restore Chapter brings back a chapter you deleted earlier.

Reordering

Drag a chapter up or down to reorder it, including across the Front Matter / Body / Appendices / Back Matter boundaries — dropping a chapter under Back Matter moves it there, and dropping one under Appendices turns it into an appendix, lettered with the rest.

Chapter markers

Chapters carry small icons that tell you something about them at a glance:

• Status — a button on the right that cycles through three states as you click it: not started, done, and needs attention. Use them however suits your process — drafting progress, proofreading passes, or flagging problems.
• Reviewing — replaces the status button while a chapter is under review.
• Boilerplate — marks a chapter that came from the template and is managed by it.
• Scratchpad — marks a chapter excluded from the built book, useful for notes and offcuts you want to keep but not publish.
• Unavailable — marks a chapter Inkwell cannot find, shown greyed out and in italics.

Both Boilerplate and Scratchpad are switched on per chapter in Local Settings; see Local Settings.

Unavailable chapters

Very occasionally a chapter appears in the list as Unavailable, greyed out and marked with a question mark. This means the entry exists but the chapter behind it does not, which almost always comes from a new chapter that was interrupted — the page reloaded, or the browser was closed, in the moment between clicking Insert and the new chapter reaching Inkwell's servers. A chapter is created the first time something is written to it, so one that was cut off that early was never created at all.

An unavailable chapter is empty and read-only, and nothing further can be recovered from it. The rest of the project is unaffected: open it and the entry is simply blank. Delete it with Remove Chapter at the bottom of the statistics panel (see Writing Content) and add the chapter again.

If a collaborator created the chapter and their browser still holds it, it can also reappear on its own once their copy of Inkwell finishes sending it — so if you know someone else added it moments ago, it is worth waiting before deleting the entry.