DocumentationWriting
Structure
Sections, roles, and the three divisions of a book. How to add, reorder, split and merge them.
A book is a list of sections. The outline down the left of the Writing screen shows them in print order, grouped under Front matter, Body and Back matter.
Every section has a role — chapter, dedication, copyright page. The role determines:
- which division it falls in
- whether it takes a chapter opening (drop cap, ornament, sinkage)
- whether it is numbered
- whether it appears in the contents
- which page numbering it carries: roman in the front matter, arabic from the body on
Adding a section
At the foot of the outline. Roles are grouped by division, so a copyright page cannot land in the middle of your novel by accident.
Some roles arrive with content already generated — Copyright builds a page from your book details, Contents builds the chapter list. The rest arrive empty.
Browse pages (the square button beside it) shows the same roles with a description of each. Use it when you are not sure what a half-title is or whether your book needs one.
The roles
| Division | Roles |
|---|---|
| Front matter | Front cover, Praise, Title page, Copyright, Dedication, Epigraph, Contents, Foreword, Preface, Introduction |
| Body | Part, Chapter, Section, Prologue, Epilogue |
| Back matter | Afterword, Appendix, Bibliography, Acknowledgements, About the author, Also by, Back cover |
Changing a role
Changing the role moves the section to its division, and applies that role’s numbering and opening treatment.
Common after an import, where anything that was not obviously front matter arrives as a chapter: an acknowledgements page that imported as Chapter 41 stops being numbered, loses its chapter opening, and moves to the back matter in one menu.
Reordering
Drag a section in the outline, or use Move up / Move down in the … menu.
Reorder the book opens a dialog showing the resulting order before you apply it — worth using for anything bigger than moving one chapter.
Splitting and merging
| Action | Where | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Split into a new chapter here | ⌘⏎, or the … menu |
Everything from the cursor down becomes a new section |
| Merge into previous | … menu |
This section’s blocks join the end of the one above |
| Make this heading a chapter | right-click in the text | Promotes a heading to a section of its own |
Splits at the cursor. The text below moves with it.
Use Make this heading a chapter when an import left chapter titles as ordinary headings inside one long section — right-click each one and promote it, which is faster than splitting by hand.
Generated sections
Two roles do not behave like the others.
Contents is rebuilt from your sections every time the book is laid out, so anything typed into it would be a stale copy of a list that regenerates. The page is read-only for that reason. Its appearance is set in FormattingContents.
Bibliography appends its generated entries to the section’s own blocks. Text you write above the list is kept and printed.