The Editor

The editor is where you’ll spend most of your time. It is optimized for editing Markdown and plain text. When you’re writing in Markdown, you can see a basic preview right within the text. For example, surrounding a word with an asterisk (*) makes it italic, two asterisks make it bold. If you prefer editing your Markdown without any highlighting, you can turn this feature off, or adjust it for individual elements in the settings. For a full preview, you can switch to the preview panel.

The editor is extensible with a very flexible system of drag’n’drop workflows and Python scripts. To learn more about these, please refer to the chapters Scripting Editorial with Python and Building Workflows.

Navigating Documents

Tap on the title of your document at the top to open the navigation/outline popup.

You can see the current word count there, and, if you’re using Markdown, you can jump directly to the different sections (headings) in your document.

You can also rename a document from the navigation popup.

If you have links in your Markdown documents, you can tap one of them to open its target in the built-in browser. This only works when the keyboard is not active (because it would be difficult to actually edit a link otherwise).

When the keyboard is active, you can select the highlighted part of the link and choose “Open Link” from the contextual menu. You can use the same method for jumping to footnotes.

Using Snippets

Snippets are little pieces of text that you can insert quickly by typing abbreviations, or by selecting them from the snippet list that is available on the extended keyboard.

A snippet is basically the same as a workflow with a single Replace Selected Text action, but it is much faster to create.

Snippets can contain any of the built-in variables, so you can use placeholders for the current date, selected text, clipboard contents, or even the title of the page currently loaded in the browser panel. You can also define where the caret should be after inserting the snippet.

Using Bookmarks

Note

The bookmarks bar is only available on the iPad.

You can use bookmarks for quick access to documents, workflows, and websites.

If the bookmarks bar isn’t already visible, you can show it by tapping the triangle in the top-lefthand corner of the editor.

Technically, a bookmark is just a shortcut for opening a URL, but because Editorial has an extensive URL scheme of its own, they can not only be used for visiting websites, but also for triggering workflows or opening often-used documents.

Tap the bookmark icon to show your bookmarks as a list that you can rearrange. Tapping on the + button creates a new bookmark with an empty URL and title that you can fill in. While you can construct a bookmark URL by hand, the Add Bookmark panel also contains shortcuts for commonly-used editorial:// URLs, for example to open the current document, or to run one of your workflows.

Tip

You can edit an existing bookmark more quickly by just tapping and holding its title in the bookmarks bar.

Keyboard Tips

Editorial extends the standard iOS keyboard with an additional row of special characters that are often used in Markdown. Using it should be straightforward if you’re familiar with the standard iOS keyboard, but the extra row has some additional functionality you might not be aware of:

• By swiping left and right on the extended keyboard row, you can move the caret on the current line, which can make it easier to position it precisely.
• Many keys can be used for multiple characters. Tap and hold one of them to show a popup, slide to the character you want, and release the finger. On the iPad, you can also perform a swipe-up gesture on such a key to insert the first alternative character, without having to wait for the popup.
• When you have text selected, you can use the (, ), [, ], ", ` and * keys to enclose the selection in a pair of matching characters. On the * key, you can also do a swipe-up gesture to enclose the selection in two asterisks on each side (making the selected text bold in Markdown documents).
• Entering an opening bracket or parentheses automatically inserts the matching counterpart (this can be disabled in the editor settings).
• iPad only: You can swipe up on the Undo key to redo changes (alternatively, you can tap and hold it to select from Undo and Redo).
• iPad only: To quickly insert a footnote, simply tap the [ key, then swipe up on the same key to insert the ^ character (the closing ] is inserted automatically).
• Tap on text in the editor with two fingers to quickly select an entire paragraph.