Tools

The Tools menu in the top bar gathers everything that acts on the project as a whole rather than on the text under your cursor.

Preview

Preview toggles the typeset PDF pane on the right of the editor. It is on by default. Widen it with the arrow on the divider, or use the fullscreen button in its own toolbar.

The preview and its controls are covered in Writing Content.

Insert from my projects

Pulls a chapter out of another one of your projects and drops it into this one. Useful for reusing a standard preface, an author biography, or material you are moving between books.

Search

Search has three modes, chosen at the top of the dialog:

• Search — find text.
• Replace — find text and substitute something else, one match at a time or all at once.
• Format — find text by its formatting rather than its content: everything bold, everything italic. This is how you track down inconsistent emphasis across a long manuscript.

Each mode can be scoped to the current chapter or the whole Project. Results are listed by chapter, and clicking one jumps straight to it.

Ctrl/Cmd-F opens Search from anywhere in the editor; Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-F clears the current search.

Cleanup

Cleanup scans the whole manuscript for the small typographic problems that creep in when text is pasted from elsewhere, and offers to fix each one:

• Remove Soft Hyphens — invisible hyphenation hints that survive a copy-paste and break words in the wrong places.
• Remove Extra Spaces — doubled spaces between words and sentences.
• Eliminate Unusual Spaces — non-breaking and other exotic space characters where an ordinary space belongs.
• Quotation Mark at Beginning of Blockquote — a leftover opening quote on text that is already set as a block quotation.
• Use Curly Quotes — straight " and ' converted to typographic quotes.

Each issue can be jumped to and fixed individually, so you stay in control of anything ambiguous.

History

Inkwell records the project as it changes, and History opens that record in a panel down the right-hand side of the editor. Choosing History again closes it, as does opening Stats.

The panel lists Current at the top, then any versions you have named, then the days you worked on the book, most recent first. Each day is broken into the separate stretches of writing it held — a morning and an evening at the same desk are two entries, not one — and each stretch shows when it ran, how long it lasted, roughly how much changed, and who was writing — you first, then anybody else who was in the book with you. Work the AI agent did is marked AI. A stretch appears as soon as you finish it. Everybody working on the project sees the same history; see Collaboration.

The panel opens showing your recent weeks and loads further back as you scroll, so a project with years behind it opens as quickly as one started yesterday. Show earlier sessions at the foot of the list does the same thing on demand, and is there for reaching the end of a long history without scrolling through it.

Reading an earlier version

Click an entry and the whole project switches to the book exactly as it stood at the moment that stretch of writing ended. The chapter list, the text and the preview all show that version, and you can move between chapters and read them exactly as usual.

While you are looking at the past the book is read-only: the toolbar and the chapter list stop accepting changes, and the AI agent refuses to run, because everything it read or wrote would belong to the old version rather than to your manuscript. Click Current at the top of the panel, or close the panel, to come back to the live book.

Nothing you do in this view can harm the manuscript, so it is safe to browse. If you only want one paragraph back rather than a whole rollback, select it in the old version, copy it, return to Current, and paste.

Naming a version

The tag button at the bottom of the panel gives whatever you have selected a name — "first draft", "sent to copyeditor" — and named versions are then listed in their own group at the top of the panel, where they stay as the day-by-day entries scroll away beneath them.

Naming while Current is selected records the book exactly as it is at that moment and names that. This is the usual way to mark a milestone before starting a big change.

When the selected entry is a named version the tag button is replaced by a remove button, which deletes the name only. The entry and the history behind it are untouched.

Reverting

The Revert dropdown, next to the tag button at the bottom of the panel, rolls the project back to whichever entry you have selected:

• Revert Chapter returns the chapter you have open to the way it was then — its text, its formatting and its comments. If the chapter has been deleted since, it comes back, in as close to its old position in the chapter list as Inkwell can work out. It is unavailable while Current is selected, and when no chapter is open.
• Revert Book does the same for every chapter at once, together with the chapter order and the project settings.

Both ask for confirmation first. A revert is recorded like any other edit, so it appears in the history as work done today, and it can itself be reverted: if you roll back to the wrong point, the version you left behind is still in the panel.

Index Entries, Boilerplate and Page Layout

Three display toggles:

• Index Entries shows or hides the index-entry markers in the text. See Index.
• Boilerplate shows or hides the template-managed chapters in the chapter list, so you can concentrate on your own writing. It also puts the Insert Variable button on the toolbar, since variables are mostly a boilerplate concern. See Templates and Boilerplate.
• Page Layout adds the Vertical Spacer, Page Break and Prevent Breaking buttons to the editor toolbar. They solve occasional typesetting problems, so they stay out of the way until you ask for them. See Advanced Formatting Features.

These three are yours, not the project's: they follow you between books and your collaborators do not see them. Turning a toolbar button off changes nothing about the book — anything already written keeps displaying, typesetting and editing as before; you simply cannot insert a new one until you switch the button back on.

Files

A place to keep arbitrary files alongside the project — a contract, a cover design, source data. Upload, download, and remove them here. They travel with the project but are not part of the manuscript.

Collab

Opens the collaborator list, where you invite people and manage their roles. See Collaboration.

API Keys

Generates a key and secret pair for programmatic access to this project. The secret is shown only once, when the key is created, so copy it then; you can revoke a key at any time from the same dialog.