Formatting Your Prose

Five Rooms stores your text as plain text with a few Markdown marks for formatting, so it's never locked into a file format. In the editor you see the formatting, not the marks for italic, bold, underline, small capitals and colours.

The asterisks and brackets are hidden once typed: you see the italic or bold, not the marks. The caret steps over them, and deleting keeps them in pairs, so formatting never spills into the next words. To see them, turn on Show formatting marks (Settings ▸ Appearance on Mac, Settings ▸ Editor on iPad and iPhone).

With nothing selected, ⌘I or ⌘B turns italic or bold on for what you type next.

On Mac and iPad, the bar at the top of the page does the same: choose Body, Block Quote or Epigraph from its menu, or use bold, italic, underline, small capitals, alignment, text colour, highlight, line spacing, lists, block quote, scene break (✦), footnote and Cite. With nothing selected, underline, small capitals and the colours apply to the word the caret is in. A new footnote's note goes at the end of the scene, ready to type. On Mac the Format menu has the same commands; on iPhone they're in the Format menu above the keyboard.

Alignment. Align left is each format's own setting: justified in a printed book, ragged in a manuscript. Centre, right and justify are kept in your text and compiled. They're for body paragraphs; quotations, epigraphs and lists keep their own.

Lists. Choose a list style to make the selected paragraphs a list, or choose it again to make them paragraphs. Return starts the next item; Return on an empty item, or Backspace just after a number, ends the list there. Numbers follow on from the list's first, so compile always numbers them in order.

Colours. Text colour and highlight are your own marks, like a highlighter on a draft. They sync and show wherever you read your text in Five Rooms, but compile leaves them out of every format.

Line spacing changes how far apart the page's lines are for this project on this device. It doesn't change your text or any compiled format, which set their own spacing (a manuscript is double-spaced).

On the page, paragraphs are indented like a printed book, a scene break shows as ✦ and each chapter opens with its number and title. The marks are still in your text; only how they're shown changes.

Links. Select the words and choose Format > Add Link… (⌥⌘L) on the Mac, the link button in the format bar, or Link… in the iPhone keyboard bar's Aa menu, then type the address: a web address, or an email address to write to. To link to another document in the project, choose A Document Here and pick it; opening the link opens that document, and in an ebook it goes to that document's chapter. Pasting a web address over selected words links them too. The words show as a link and the address is hidden; with the cursor in a link, a card below the page shows where it goes, with Open, Edit… and Remove. On the Mac, ⌘-click a link to open it, or Control-click it for the same choices. Imported Word documents, Scrivener projects, Substack posts and clipped web pages keep their links. Ebooks, Word documents, HTML and the posts you copy for Substack keep links; print shows just the words (a format's settings can list the addresses as notes instead).

Press Shift-Return for a line break within a paragraph, as in verse or an address. It's kept as a backslash at the end of the line, hidden like the other marks; with Show formatting marks on you'll see it. Backspace at the start of the next line, or Delete at the end of the line, takes the line break out. To type a literal asterisk or bracket, put a backslash before it: \*.

Headings aren't used. Chapter titles come from the contents, and compile numbers and styles them for each format. Notes to yourself go in the margin (see Margin Comments and Suggestions).

Pasting

Text pasted from another app arrives as plain paragraphs. Any asterisks or brackets in it are escaped so they aren't read as formatting. Text copied within Five Rooms keeps its formatting.

Quotation marks and dashes

Quotation marks are curled and dashes made as you type. Text imported from elsewhere may still contain straight or wrong-way quotes. See Quotation Marks and Common Mistakes.