Getting Started with UX Write

1 Introduction

2 Basic Concepts

2.1 Accessing your Documents

2.2 File formats

2.3 Editing

2.4 Styles and Formatting

2.5 Document Structure

2.6 Auto Correct

3 Common Tasks

3.1 Using Automatic Numbering

3.2 Creating Templates

3.3 Dropbox Versioning

3.4 Converting from HTML to docx

4 Troubleshooting

4.1 Reporting Bugs

4.2 The Field Update Problem

4.3 Opening .doc files

5 Upcoming features

Introduction

Welcome to UX Write — the most powerful word processor available for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. UX Write is designed for high-end, professional authoring projects such as reports, research papers, and books. It is the first to bring many of the advanced features of desktop word processors to iOS.

UX Write focuses on the most important aspects of your writing — your ideas and words. Text layout is automatically adapted to suit your screen size and orientation, as well as your preferred viewing size, configured via the settings menu. The powerful outline editor lets you quickly jump to different sections of your document, and even rearrange the order of sections.

Presentational details such as fonts, indentation, line spacing, and paragraph alignment are controlled via styles, which let you achieve a consistent look and feel throughout your whole document. While you can use direct formatting for special cases if you need to, it's best to set up styles for the default formatting and special types of paragraphs such as headings. Using the heading styles also makes it possible to use the outline editor to view your document structure, achieve automatic numbering, add cross-references, and include an automatically-generated table of contents.

Basic Concepts

Accessing your Documents

When you first open UX Write, you will see a list of documents, plus three locations: My iPad (or iPhone), Dropbox, and WebDAV. Documents you create in the My iPad/iPhone location are stored only on your device, and are not synced. You can transfer them to your computer via iTunes file sharing or email. Documents you create in Dropbox or WebDAV are stored online, with a local copy kept as well for offline access.

Synchronisation happens automatically — you don't have to manually upload or download files when you change them. Every time you close a document, it is automatically uploaded to the server. If you are running the Dropbox client for Mac or PC, the updated file will appear on your computer in a matter of seconds.

If you're working offline, you can still add and change documents in the Dropbox or WebDAV locations. UX Write will simply store these changes locally on your device and sync them the next time Internet connectivity is available. UX Write also keeps a local copy of all documents you've previously edited, so you can still access them offline.

Tip: We recommend creating and storing all your documents on Dropbox, because it keeps backup copies of every version uploaded for 30 days. You can view and recover old versions of your document if the need arises — see Section 3.3.

File formats

The native file format of UX Write is HTML5 — the same as used on the web. UX Write displays documents in the same way as a web browser, and is in fact built on the same layout engine as Safari and Chrome, which is called WebKit. HTML files can be viewed using any web browser or device, and easily published online.

With version 1.1, we've introduced support for the .docx file format used by all recent versions of Microsoft Word (2007 and later). You can edit these directly just like HTML files, and seamlessly exchange documents between UX Write on your iPad and Word on your PC or Mac.

Because .docx files get converted to HTML and back again when you open and close a document, you may notice some differences between the layout shown in Word and in UX Write. All your content is maintained however, and features that UX Write doesn't yet support (e.g. footnotes) are preserved in your original document.

You can also print your document or export it to PDF via the “share” button at the right end of the toolbar. Exporting to PDF is also equivalent to a print preview, since this shows you exactly what your document will look like when paginated.

Editing

Text editing works in much the same way as in any other iOS application, but with a few enhancements:

• An extra row of keys above the keyboard provides access to common punctuation symbols

• The two leftmost keys let you move the cursor or select text by holding them down to bring up a virtual trackpad. Swipe with one finger to move slowly, and two fingers to move faster.

• The formatting key, when held down, replaces the other top-row keys with keys for basic formatting options like bold, italic, and lists

• The autocorrect key allows you to confirm or revert the latest autocorrect replacement (see Section 2.6 for more details)

• You can triple-tap anywhere in the text to select the whole paragraph

Note: The keyboard extensions are only available on the iPad.

UX Write also includes full support for external bluetooth keyboards, and supports all of the standard iOS keyboard shortcuts:

Keyboard shortcuts

Styles and Formatting

UX Write encourages you to use styles to format your document, instead of manually setting formatting options like font size and paragraph alignment on a case-by-case basis. Styles make it much easier to achieve consistent formatting throughout your whole document, particularly when you want to make global changes like altering the appearance of all headings.

To change the style of the current paragraph, open the Formatting menu (the 'A' icon in the toolbar). Here you will see a list of common styles, including the normal paragraph style and three levels of headings. More built-in styles are available, an you can also add your own. Tapping Edit Styles brings up the style manger, which lets you change the formatting of any built-in or custom styles, including the document defaults.

Direct formatting is still available if you want it, via the button at the bottom of the formatting menu. This gives you the same properties as are available in the style editor, but the changes only apply to the current selection.

Styles you create in UX Write are fully compatible with Word, and you can also edit and use the styles in Word itself.

Tip: If you want to re-use your styles with multiple documents, you can set up a template for creating new documents. See Section 3.2 for details.

Document Structure

Most formal documents like reports and books are divided into multiple levels of sections, with cross-references between them, and a table of contents at the front. Styles are key to achieving this, because the program needs to be told which pieces of text are headings — it can't simply guess that “18 point bold” means a second-level heading. By using styles to mark all your headings, you can take advantage of the following features:

• Table of contents (Insert menu)

• Cross-references (Insert menu)

• Automatic numbering

• Outline editor (Outline button on toolbar)

Whenever a section number changes as a result of changes earlier in the document, its number is automatically updated, as are those of all references that point to it, and the table of contents. The same is true of figures and tables. When you print or generate a PDF, page numbers are automatically calculated for you and included in the table of contents.

Auto Correct

Automatic correction of typing mistakes can sometimes lead to unexpected results, since no piece of software can accurately guess what you meant to type in every case. When UX Write makes a correction, it highlights it in green, and gives you the opportunity to confirm whether or not it has made the right replacement.

Tapping on a highlighted word brings up a menu that allows you to accept the correction, revert to the original, or bring up a list of more suggestions, with the option to add the word to the custom dictionary. Any substitutions you explicitly accept are remembered by UX Write, and will occur automatically the next time you make the same typing mistake. You can access the custom dictionary and list of automatic substitutions via the settings menu.

Common Tasks

Using Automatic Numbering

UX Write can automatically assign numbers to all of your section headings, figures, and tables. All headings are numbered by default, though you can disable this on a case-by-case basis by tapping on the heading and selecting Remove Number, or on a document-wide basis using the Heading Numbering option in the settings menu.

For figures and tables, you can choose whether to add a number at insertion time, as one of the options in the popup dialog. To turn numbering on or off after, or change other properties such as the caption, tap on the table or figure and select the appropriate option from the popup menu.

Numbers assigned to section headings, figures, or tables are calculated automatically, and always kept up to date as you add or remove content. Cross-references and the table of contents, list of figures, or list of tables are also updated automatically.

Creating Templates

Often you'll want to create a series of documents which all have a consistent look and feel, based on styles that you have set up, as described in Section 2.4. You can achieve this by creating a “template file”, which is just a normal document that you use as a starting point for new ones.

To create a template:

1. Create a new document, calling it “Template” (or whatever you like)

2. Open the document and use the style manager to change the default fonts, colours, and other formatting properties that you want

3. Create any custom styles that you will use regularly — e.g. “Title” or “Abstract”

To create a new document based on a template:

1. Tap and hold on the template document in the file manager

2. Select “Duplicate”

3. Type in the name for your new document

4. Open the new document and start writing!

We'll be adding a more sophisticated mechanism for browsing and previewing templates, along with a few default ones, in a future update.

Dropbox Versioning

One of the best features of Dropbox is that it automatically keeps old versions of every file that's uploaded to it. It's always been possible to log into the Dropbox website and access these old versions via their web interface, but now you can do it directly from within UX Write itself.

If you ever need to recover an older version of a document, simply tap and hold on it in the file browser, and select “Versions” in the popup menu. You can then browse through all the versions that Dropbox has kept, and restore the one you want. UX Write autosaves every three minutes, so if you're connected to the Internet while you're working, you'll have regular snapshots of your documents.

Note: Versioning is a feature of Dropbox; UX Write simply provides a user interface to let you access it. We only provide support for UX Write itself; if you encounter problems such as missing versions (and those problems are also apparent when using Dropbox's web interface), you will need to contact Dropbox for support.

Converting from HTML to docx

If you've upgraded from a previous version of UX Write and wish to convert your HTML documents to .docx so they can be used with Microsoft Word, you can do so as follows:

• Tap and hold on the document in the file browser

• Select Convert to docx

Note that due to differences between the two file formats, there may be some loss of formatting during the transition — for example, the rounded borders used in the “Tip” style in this document can't be represented in docx. For this reason, the original HTML file will be kept as a backup.

Troubleshooting

Reporting Bugs

If you encounter a crash in UX Write, you will be asked if you would like to submit a bug report. This will allow us to diagnose the problem and fix it in the next update. When you submit such a report, none of the text or images in your document are sent to us — so any confidential information you may have in your document remains safe. The error log contains information about what the program was doing when the program crashed, which enables us to track down the bug.

We are only able to fix bugs that we can reproduce. In many cases, we can figure out how to do this just from the error log, but any information you can give us about how to trigger the bug is going to be of help. In some cases we may ask you to provide a list of steps that can be taken to reproduce the bug. We take bug fixes seriously and endeavour to get them resolved as quickly as possible.

If you encounter any other issues that do not involve a crash, such as formatting inconsistencies or strange user interface behaviour, just select the Email Us option from the settings menu and send us a note.

The Field Update Problem

If you open a .docx file in Word after editing it in UX Write, you'll see the following message:

“This document contains fields that may refer to other files. Do you want to update the fields in this document?”

When you see this message, just click Yes (or press the Y key).

Sadly, this is a symptom of a design flaw in Word, and is something only Microsoft can fix. Unlike UX Write, Word does not keep the table of contents, cross references, or figure/table numbers (all collectively known as Fields) up to date automatically. Instead, it forces you to manually tell it when it to update the fields after you have made changes to your document.

Despite the fact that UX Write never actually produces fields that refer to other files, this message is still displayed in every version of Word that we have tested with, including Word 2013. The only way we could prevent such a dialog from appearing is to store a setting in the document that tells Word that there is no need to update the fields — but this would simply leave you with an invalid table of contents and incorrect cross-references. While we've done our best to ensure that UX Write provides the best user experience within the app itself, we're not able to fix Word.

Opening .doc files

Microsoft Word has used a number of different file formats over the years, and UX Writes only supports the most recent version, .docx, which is a modern, XML-based, well-documented open standard. The older .doc format is an proprietary and very complex binary file format that would take a minimum of six months to support. We've decided that time is better spent on other useful features instead (see Section 5).

If you have a .doc file that you wish to edit in UX Write, you can convert it to .docx by opening it in any recent version of Word (2007 and later), and using “Save as” to convert it to docx. Doing so will maintain all of the content and formatting, and provide exactly the same experience when working with the document in Word itself. You will then have your document in a much more portable format, and be able to edit it in Word, UX Write, and other word processors such as LibreOffice.

Upcoming features

UX Write is still a relatively young product, and we have many exciting features planned for future versions. These include the following:

Document elements and editing features

• Find & replace

• Change tracking

• Enhanced table editing

• Headers and footers

• Footnotes

• Explicit page breaks

• Equations

• Bibliography and citations

• Table styles and character styles

• Additional formatting options

• Custom numbering schemes

File management

• Move and copy files and folders

• Improved template management

• Support for additional online storage services

• Document comparison and merging

• Integration with version control systems

File format support

• LaTeX

• Open Document Format (ODF)

• Markdown

• OPML

• EPUB

We publish regular updates on our progress on the app on our blog. You can also contact us via email and follow us on Twitter.