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. From the top: Preview, Insert from my projects, Find & Replace, Cleanup and History; then four display toggles; then Users and API Keys.

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

Searches the text of every chapter in all of your projects and inserts a copy of a passage at your cursor. Useful for reusing a standard acknowledgement, an author biography, or a passage you are moving between books.

Type a few words from the passage you want. Each matching paragraph is listed with the project and chapter it comes from. The jump button beside a result opens that chapter with the paragraph selected; adjust the selection to take more or less, then click Insert. Only what you selected is copied, and the original is left as it was.

Find & Replace

Find & Replace has three modes, chosen at the top of the dialog:

• Find — 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 a match inside a footnote carries a Note tag beside the chapter name. The jump button beside a result takes you to the matched text and selects it, opening the note first if that is where the match is. Typing next replaces the selected word, just as it would anywhere else in the editor.

Ctrl/Cmd-F opens Find & Replace from anywhere in the editor, and Ctrl-H (Cmd-Shift-H on a Mac) opens it straight in Replace mode; pressed with the dialog already open, either one switches it to that mode. Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-F clears the current search.

In Replace and Format mode, each match shows what it would become, with a button to accept the change and another to reject it. Rejecting leaves the text alone and drops the match from the list. To go through them from the keyboard, Alt-A accepts and Alt-R rejects the suggestion highlighted in yellow, then the highlight moves on to the next one (Option-A and Option-R on a Mac). The buttons' tooltips show the same shortcuts.

Quotes and apostrophes you type into the Find and Replace boxes become curly, exactly as they do in the manuscript, so searching for don't finds don’t and replacing with it's writes it’s. To look for a straight quote instead — the sort that arrives with pasted text — paste it into the box rather than typing it, and it stays as it is. Cleanup, below, finds them throughout the manuscript.

Commenting on a result

The comment button beside the jump button leaves a comment on the match without leaving Find & Replace. The comment box opens under the result. Once you send it, the thread is there, numbered and highlighted, exactly as if you had made it in the chapter. To comment on something other than the match, select those words in the result first, or press Ctrl-Alt-M there, just as in the editor. A result that already has comments on it shows them underneath, so you can reply as you go.

If you close Find & Replace before sending, an empty comment is dropped. One you have started typing stays open in the chapter so you can finish it.

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 turning Preview on; opening History turns Preview off.

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 Name Version 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 button becomes Remove Name, which deletes the name only. The entry and the history behind it are untouched.

Reverting

The Revert dropdown, next to the Name Version 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, Inline Notes, Boilerplate and Page Layout

Four display toggles:

• Index Entries shows or hides the index-entry markers in the text. See Index.
• Inline Notes shows each footnote's text in the chapter, under the paragraph its number sits in (after the text that carries on beyond it, if a quotation or list interrupts the paragraph), and lets you edit it there. The page stops for it the way it stops for a comment, and the note lies in a card in the break. With it off — which is how it starts — a note's text lives in the pop-up box that opens when you click its number; with it on, that box does not open, because the text is already on the page. It covers annotations as well as ordinary notes, and the number beside a note moves it between the two families, exactly as the number in the pop-up does. See Footnotes and Endnotes.
• 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 four 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.

Users

Opens the Users panel, where you see who is on the project, invite people, set what each of them may do, and choose whose writing is tracked. It takes the place of the manuscript while it is open, and the Users icon in the left rail opens and closes the same panel. 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.