User Manual

Version 7.9

Revision date: April 9, 2020

SmartEdit Writer in 1,200 words

The entry point for SmartEdit Writer is the Project Manager which you access from the icon on your
desktop. From the project manager you can open a recent project, create a new project, or browse to a
project not shown in the recent list — on a thumb drive for example.

I’ve kept the Project Manager as simple and clutter free as possible, as the main work of SmartEdit Writer is
carried out inside each project. A few points to note. You cannot open the same project twice at the same
time. You CAN have multiple projects with the same name. Only projects that are accessible will appear in
the Recent Projects list — this means that if you opened a project from a thumb drive yesterday, and the
drive is unplugged today, it will not appear in the list. Plug the drive back in and use the Open Project
button.

A sample Huckleberry Finn project is included with each installation. Click on the project name in the
Project manager to see what it’s all about.

The main SmartEdit Writer window has three sections: the Document area to the left, which contains your
folders, chapters, scenes and notes, as well as a Fragments section where you store old or misplaced scenes;
the tabbed word processor in the centre; the Research and Notes section to the right. Left and right sections
can be closed to free up more space for writing.
The Document tree is where you organise your project. Here you add new scenes, attach notes to scenes or
folders, and reorganise a project by dragging and dropping scenes, folders and notes. It’s a fluid design,
which means you decide what kind of structure you want to have. In the Huckleberry Finn project, each
chapter is given a folder, and scenes exist within that folder. Notes hang off anything, even each other.

There are some restrictions. You can’t add a scene or folder to a note,
but you can add a scene to another scene. It all comes down to how you
want to lay out your work and what suits your way of working.
 The Fragments tree is where you send scenes or notes that you do
not want to use in your main Document, or that you may wish to
use later. Basically, bits of scenes, dialog, or prose that might be
useful down the road. You send a scene, folder or note to
Fragments by using the Move to Fragments button, or from the
right click menu. You open the Fragments tree from the toolbar
button. A reverse, Move to Document exists on the Fragment tree
that allows you to send that scene or note back to the Document
tree when its time has come.

The Research tree, introduced in version 2, is where you store

information that you collect as you work. You can add images,
external files, links to websites and web pages — anything that has
relevance to your work-in-progress. Double clicking on any of these
files will open that file, image or website immediately.

The Research tree is a good place to store your outlines and

character sheets. As with the Document and Fragments trees you
can create folders, and add scenes and notes.
The word processor in the centre contains basic word processing functionality. Its menu ribbon is similar to
Word’s, but lighter. All the usual Word shortcuts will work here, and many options not visible on the menu
toolbar will still work if you remember the Word shortcuts.

When you re-open a project, scenes that were previously open will be opened again in the same order, so
you can get back to work straight away.

Notes are everywhere. They can be attached to your

Document, to folders, to scenes, to other notes, to fragments,
to anything. A note is designed to hold a small amount of
text, though it does use the same word processor as scenes,
allowing you to use bullet lists and text formatting if you
wish. Notes open to the right of the word processor, in a list
that can be expanded or collapsed. A note can be resized,
which means you can have three or four notes visible at the
same time as you work on your scene: a brief synopsis, some
character descriptions, a couple of sentences you want to use
later, whatever takes your fancy.

As with the tabbed word processor, any note that was open when you last opened the project will be open
when you re-open a project.

The combination of Document tree, tabbed word processor and notes is what makes SmartEdit Writer what
it is. Yes, there will be more features added over time, but it’s this core feature set and the easy interaction
between them that makes SmartEdit Writer such a productive tool for writers.

And there’s more. Autosave is automatic — you don’t get a choice here. SmartEdit Writer will save
everything every minute or so, which means the prospect of losing work due to a system crash is small. Each
scene is stored in a separate file, making the likelihood of damaging an entire document due to corruption —
which can happen with Word — remote.

Automatic backups happen every time you close a project — be sure to configure this when you start using
SmartEdit Writer.

Proper handling for curly quotes, em dashes and ellipsis is built in. Even in Word it can be difficult getting
something as simple as em dashes to display, not to mention ellipsis. In SmartEdit Writer, two hyphens
produce an em dash, and three periods an ellipsis, unless you choose to switch this off in Settings.

Exporting a combined, complete document is a single click process. The export feature will combine all
scenes in your document, in order, from top to bottom, into a single Microsoft Word document. Fragments
and notes are not included — only the scenes that sit in your Document tree. This is an area that will be
improved over time, but it was important to get at least a rudimentary export option in place for the early
version.
Recent version of SmartEdit Writer introduced new features such as a daily word count record, a Dark
Theme and a Character Name Generator.

Version 7, released in April 2019, brought the full editing power of SmartEdit for Word into SmartEdit
Writer. Editor runs a series of checks on your entire document and highlights areas that you might want to
look at. This includes:

 Monitoring word and phrase over-use

 Highlighting adverbs, dialogue tags and redundant words
 Zooming in on punctuation issues
 Identifying long sentences
 Spotting misplaced proper nouns
 Allowing you to easily monitor your crutch words

You can run these checks as a whole on your entire document or individually against a single scene. It all
depends on how you work and how you prefer to edit. Select the SmartEdit Editor toolbar and click on the
check you want to run.
New releases of SmartEdit Writer are frequent. Keep an eye on the forum for news and discussion on
upcoming changes.

And that’s it for the first version. Work is ongoing, and version 2 is already under development. Keep an eye
on the forum for news on new releases.

Darren, (April 26th, 2019)

Getting started
Creating a new project

The SmartEdit Writer application consists of two separate parts: the Project Manager, where you open a
project or create a new project, and Writer, where you work on an individual project. Writer is where you
will do most of your work and all of your creative work.

To get started, double click the desktop icon to launch the Project Manager. The first time you open the
Project Manager a single sample project called “Huckleberry Finn” will be there. Once you create your own
projects, they will be listed here in the order they were last opened. This provides a quick way to jump into
the projects you are currently working on. Clicking on the name of a project will open that project in Writer.

To create a new project, click on the “Create New Project” button at the bottom of the Project Manager
dialog. This is the only place where you can create a new project. You cannot create a new project from
within the larger Writer application, as Writer can only open for an existing project.

Let’s create a new project and call it “The Mad Monk of Portrane.” Portrane is a small residential area on
the coast in north Dublin whose sole claim to fame is the presence of a large Victorian asylum of
architectural note.
After choosing a project name, which you can change later, you must choose a location for the project
folder. This will default to the SmartEdit Writer folder inside your Windows Documents folder. Unless there
is a pressing reason to change this location, you should leave it as is. You should resist any temptation to
select a Dropbox or other cloud storage folder as the working location, as SmartEdit Writer will not work
correctly from within a Cloud storage folder.

After clicking finish, the new project will be set up and opened in SmartEdit Writer. This may take about 5
seconds or so on a slow machine. When the project opens, it will be empty apart from a few default folders
and scenes that are created automatically — see the screenshot below.

Writer will open on the Start Page. This page contains of a few links back to the website under the Get
Started section, as well as some commonly used options under the Actions section. These include exporting
to a single Word document, opening the Project Manager, backing up your project and configuring the
automatic backups. If you haven’t yet set a location for your automatic backups, you should do so now by
selecting the Configure automatic backups link.

There are four toolbars in Writer, named Project, Actions & Tools, Word Processor, SmartEdit Editor, and
Help. The Project toolbar is where you will find buttons to create new folders, scenes and notes and add
images or bookmarks. There are also buttons to move between your main Document tree and the Fragments
tree on the left, and between the Research tree, Notes section and Daily Word Count section on the right.

The Document tree is where your novel or short story lives. Here you add scenes and notes, move them
around by dragging and dropping them until the structure is the way you want it, and open them in the word
processor or in the notes section to the right. Select a folder and click the New Scene button, or open the
right click menu and choose New Scene. An empty scene will open in the word processor and the scene will
be highlighted in the Document tree so that you can give it a name.
 Adding notes and folders works in the same way. To add a folder,
scene or note to the top level, select the project name — “The Mad
Monk of Portrane” and follow the same steps as above.
Scenes, notes, folders and even the project itself can be renamed
by selecting the item in the tree, opening the right click menu, and
choosing rename.

The Research tree to the right is where you store research material such as images, PDF or other files, as
well as bookmarks to websites and web pages. You can also build up character profiles and outlines in this
section by creating folders, scenes and notes, just as you do in the Document tree. The tree structures are
fluid by design — you get to choose how to use them and to decide what goes where.

In the new project, double click on a note. One is called Notes, the other is called Brief Outline. This will
open the note in the notes section to the right of the word processor. Notes were designed to hold small bits
of text, usually about the scene or folder it is attached to, or about the project as a whole. Some writers like
to have a note for each scene outlining the main points to hit in that scene, others prefer notes to sit at the
folder level where they document the chapter as a whole. How you structure this is up to you.

Notes can be attached to anything in the any tree — scenes, folders, bookmarks, images, the project itself,
even other notes. You decide which structure best suits your writing and organisational style. But remember,
you can move these notes around by dragging and dropping at any time.

As you’re new to SmartEdit Writer, this is a good place to mention a quick customisation you may wish to
carry out. The left and right sections can be widened if they appear too narrow on your PC. To do this, drag
the separator to the right or left as shown below.
If you close and re-open your new project, you will find that any scenes or notes that were open when you
closed it will be open when you re-open, allowing you to jump straight back in to your work.

If you prefer to write on a dark background, open the Settings dialog and switch on the Dark Theme. You’ll
find more about that here.

That should be enough to get you started with your project. More advanced functionality such as Fragments,
and importing your Word documents is outlined in other topics of this manual.
The Project Manager

The Project Manager is where you open existing projects and create new projects. It’s the start point for
SmartEdit Writer and it’s a dialog you will see and use every day.

If you fire up your PC and want to continue working on your novel where you left off yesterday, you open
the Project Manager and select that project from the top of the Recently Opened Projects list.

If you plug in a USB drive and want to open a project on that drive, you click the Open Project button in the
Project Manager, browse to the USB drive folder and select the atomic.scribbler file in the project that you
want to open.

If you want to create a new project, you click the Create New Project button, follow the two step wizard, and
your new project is created and opened for you.

Recently Opened Projects list

The recent list is at the heart of the Project Manager. It’s rare that you’ll be creating new projects, less rare
that you’ll be opening projects on plug-in drives, but extremely common that you’ll want to open one of the
last few projects you worked on.

The recent list shows your projects in the order they were last opened, with the most recent at the top.
Clicking on the name of the project will open that project so you can get to work. For most users most of the
time, this is all you’ll be doing inside the Project Manager.

But that’s not all it does. Let’s take a look at the “Huckleberry Finn” example in the screenshot below.

Underneath the project name there are a few pieces of additional information. The created and modified
dates for the project, along with a word count. The modified date is especially useful as you may have
multiple projects with the same name. The modified date will allow you to quickly identify the project you
worked on most recently and distinguish it from an old version that you opened last week.
The word count is not a total word count for the project, it’s a word count for all the scenes in your
Document tree. Notes are not included in this total, neither are fragments. The word count total is updated
every time you close a project, so may be out of sync if you leave the Project Manager open as you work on
a project.

When you open a project, you will notice that a padlock icon appears for that entry in the recent list
underneath the menu button. This padlock means the project is already open. You cannot open a project
twice at the same time. If you close the project this padlock will disappear in a second or two, allowing you
to re-open it.

Menu Options

There is a small drop down menu to the right of each entry in the recent list. It’s easy to miss, but take a look
at the screenshot below.

This menu has only three options: Open Project, Go to Folder, and Remove from List. The first doesn’t need
an explanation. The second will take you to the folder that contains the project. This will usually be inside
your “Documents/SmartEdit Writer” folder, unless you chose a different location when you created the
project. Selecting this option is another quick way to identify which project you are opening if you have
multiple projects with the same name. I’ll discuss this folder in more detail below. Finally, selecting the
third menu option, Remove from List, will remove the specified project from the recent list. It will NOT
delete or remove the project itself. This is a useful feature if your recent list gets filled up with old projects
you no longer wish to see, or copies of projects. Trimming the list down to 3 or 4 recent projects makes
things easier to manage.

Creating a new Project

I’ve already touched on how to create a new project in the Getting Started entry. You can read more about
that here.

Open Project Button

To open a project not in the recent list, click on the Open Project button. This brings up a standard file open
dialog, and the location will be preset to whatever location you last opened a project from. This behaviour is
standard across SmartEdit Writer. Every time you open a save, open or browse dialog, your previous use of
that dialog will be remembered and the folder location pre-selected.

Before outlining how to open a project in this way, it’s worth touching on the structure of a SmartEdit
Writer project. A project is not a single file, it’s a folder of files. This folder can contain many hundreds of
documents, images and files, as well as a small database that binds everything in your project together.
Projects are stand alone — they know nothing about each other, and are not inter-related in any way.
Changing one project cannot affect another project; deleting one will have no impact on another.

When you create a new project, a folder is created in the folder location you specified to contain all the files
of that project. Usually that folder will have the same name as the project, but there are exceptions. For
example, if you create a project called “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and a project/folder already exists
with that name in the same location, a new folder called “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1” or 2, 3, 4 will
be created for the project. Similarly, if you create a project that uses characters that are not allowed in
Windows file names, the project folder will trim out those special characters and construct a folder name
around them.

What if you create a new project that contains ONLY illegal file name characters? An example would be a
project called “<< >>”. In this case, a folder named “SmartEdit Writer Project” or “SmartEdit Writer Project
2” will be created.

What do you select when you want to open a project using the Open Project dialog? Browse to the folder
that contains your project. Open that folder and you will see a file called atomic.scribbler — see the
screenshot below. This file stands out as it has a SmartEdit icon. Selecting this file will open that project.

Usually when you see a specific icon attached to a file, like the SmartEdit icon above, it means you can
double click on the file and open whatever it is in its default application. This holds true for SmartEdit
Writer and is a quick way to open a project while bypassing the Project Manager. Say you’re used to
opening your Word documents direct by browsing to your Documents folder and double clicking the Word
document. You can do the same with your SmartEdit Writer projects — open the folder of the project you
want to open and double click on the atomic.scribbler file.

This method is especially useful if you are opening a project from a plug-in drive, as the normal behavior is
for that drive to pop open in Explorer, allowing you to see the project folder straight away.

A few points to note about the recent list. When the Project Manager opens, if a project that should be in the
list cannot be found, it will not appear in the list. This can happen if you opened a project yesterday from a
plug-in drive and that plug-in drive is now unplugged. It will not appear again in the recent list until you
open it another way, by using the Open Project button or by double clicking on the atomic.scribbler file in
the project folder as outlined above.

That’s it for the Project Manager. It’s simple by design. I didn’t want to clutter it with options that might be
rarely used. Its primary purpose is to allow you to quickly open a project and to easily create new project.
Scenes, Fragments & Notes
The SmartEdit Writer workflow

You’ve created your project. You have a basic understanding of what the UI looks like and how it works.
Now it’s time to get started on fleshing out your novel — adding chapters and scenes, attaching notes to
those scenes, and getting on with the job of writing.

I’ll begin by explaining the Document Tree in some detail. The Document Tree is your manuscript, your
novel broken down into its component chapters and scenes. This is where you add a new chapter, add a
scene to a chapter, move scenes around until they’re in the right place, write notes for scenes or chapters.
The Document Tree is where you structure your work in progress. It’s highly flexible — you decide how
much detail you want to break your novel down into.

The definition of a folder or a scene is up to you. They become whatever you want them to be. For one
writer, a folder could be used to contain all the work of a single chapter, in which case their Document Tree
might have 30 folders, named “Chapter 1”, “Chapter 2”, etc. Inside each folder might be 5 or 10 scenes,
each containing a single part of that chapter. A descriptive scene, followed by a meeting scene, followed by
a fight scene, a discussion, a sex scene, whatever…

For another writer, coming from a long history of working in a single Microsoft Word document, breaking a
novel down to such small pieces might be a step too far. They might choose to create a single folder called
“First Draft”, which might contain 30 scenes numbered “Chapter 1”, “Chapter 2”, etc., and attach a single
note to each scene.
It really is up to you. Don’t let the SmartEdit Writer naming conventions of Folder, Scene and Note confuse
you — YOU decide.

Speaking only for myself, I like to break down my work into a series of small scenes. One of the advantages
of doing this is if I decide later that a particular 300 word scene should not happen in Chapter 7, where I
originally wrote it, but in Chapter 12, I can easily drag it from the Chapter 7 folder and drop it into the
Chapter 12 folder. Or I may decide that a scene I wrote a month ago should not be used at all, in which case
I select it and click the Move to Fragments button, removing it from my Document Tree but maintaining it
in Fragments in case I want to read or use it later.

Adding Folders, Scenes, and Notes is easy. You simply select the parent item in the tree and click the button
on the toolbar to add a new scene, note or folder. Or right click on the tree and choose from the menu that
appears. If you want to add a new item (folder, scene or note) to the top level of your novel, select the
project name at the very top of the Document Tree and click an add button in just the same way.

When it comes to adding new items to the Document Tree, there are some limitations. You can add folders
to other folders, and you can go as many levels deep as you wish. You can add scenes to folders and you can
even add scenes to other scenes. Scenes cannot be added to notes. Speaking of notes, they can be attached or
added to anything: to folders, to scenes, even to other notes.

Notes in a SmartEdit Writer project are everywhere. They are incredibly versatile and form a major
component of the UI. If you choose not to use notes or to use them sparingly, you will miss out on one of
SmartEdit Writer’s key features.

Notes really come into their own for writers who are plotters and planners. If you’re the sort of writer who
sits down without knowing what you’re going to write, you may not find notes that useful. But for the writer
who plans out each scene in advance, notes are fantastic.

I’ve tried to make notes a fully integrated part of the user interface, so that when you are working on a
scene, you can have the word processor open in the centre of the screen, your Document Tree to the left, and
the notes for that scene open to the right. This way you can refer to the notes as you work without having to
open different windows or interrupt your flow.

The Notes editor uses the same toolbar as the primary word processor, which means you can use the full
range of word processor features such as bold, italic, lists, etc. within a note as you can within the word
processor.

The more time you spend using the Document Tree — adding folders and scenes, creating notes, dragging
and dropping items around — the sooner you’ll get the hang of it. The key thing to remember is that you
decide how your Document is structured. Every writer works differently. You should aim to bend the
SmartEdit Writer project structure to meet your way of working rather than feel the need to change the way
you work.

Dragging and Dropping

To move things around in the Document, Fragments and Research trees, you need to drag and drop.
Positioning something so that it goes where you want it to go using drag and drop can be tricky at first, but
once you get the hang of it, you’ll find it to be straight forwards.
Once you begin to drag a scene or note, you’ll notice a small icon appearing to the right of each item you
drag over. In the example below, there’s a green arrow just before I drop Chapter 2 on top of Chapter 1. The
green arrow means the item will be dropped inside the other item. In this case, this is not what I want to do,
as I’m looking to drag Chapter 2 so that it is next to, and not inside Chapter 1.

If I try again, and move a little more slowly this time, a blue arrow will appear. This blue arrow means
Chapter 2 is about to be dropped above Chapter 3, which is the outcome I’m looking for. Keep an eye on the
arrows that appear as you move so that you achieve the desired outcome. It may take you a few attempts to
get this right as you start out, but will quickly become second nature.

Fragments
Fragments are unique to SmartEdit Writer and are one of my favourite features. I built Fragments into the
project because I needed somewhere to store my bits and pieces — scenes or notes about scenes that I no
longer need or that I have chosen to exclude, a page of dialog that I penned weeks ago that has nowhere to
sit in my novel, scenes involving a character that I’ve since gotten rid of.

Think of Fragments as a desk drawer for your current work in progress. You toss in things that might or
might not be used later, or scenes or chapters that you know will not be used but that you don’t want to toss
in the bin.

Fragments are always there, a part if your project that you can come back to at any time, but NOT a part of
your Document or novel. When the time comes to create a single document or manuscript at the end of the
first or second draft stage, any Fragments will be left out.

The Fragments tree is accessible by clicking the Fragments button on the toolbar. It occupies the same space
to the left of the word processor and works in the same way as the Document Tree. You can open any scenes
or notes it contains, you can move them around by dragging and dropping, you can delete them if you
choose. And you can create new folders, scenes and notes from scratch, right inside the Fragments tree.
 You can move anything from the Document tree to the
Fragments tree using the Move to Fragments button on the
toolbar or from the right click menu. Moving something
back from Fragments to your Document works in the same
way, by selecting the item in the Fragments tree and
choosing Move to Document. When you move something in
this way it will be placed at the very bottom of the other tree.

By the time you reach the end of the third draft of your
80,000 word novel, you may find that your Fragments tree is
larger than your Document tree.

Images, Bookmarks & Files

Up until version 6, images, files and bookmarks could only be added to the Research tree. While it is a good
idea to keep all research in one place, many users (myself included) wanted the option to add a small
selection of links or images directly into the Document tree.

Version 6 opened up these additional options to the Document and Fragments trees. Just as you add a scene,
folder or note, you can now add an image, external file or bookmark.
The Research Tree
Collecting images, bookmarks and files in your project

Think of the Research tree as a stack of folders filled with bits and pieces that you collect over the course of
a year or more, all relating to your novel. You may have begun collecting these bits and pieces months
before you began writing, and continued collecting as your novel progressed. Of course, nowadays that
physical folder taking up so much space on your desk is online; paper documents are files and PDFs;
photographs are images or links to images on websites.

SmartEdit Writer allows you to group your work-in-progress and any research you’ve built up about it into a
single project. In the same way that you add folders, scenes and notes to your Document tree, you add them
to your Research tree. Inside the Research tree you can also add files, PDF documents, images, and
bookmarks to websites and web pages.

And of course notes, always there are notes.

To open the Research tree select the Research button on the Project toolbar or use the F8 shortcut key. The
tree will open to the left of the word processor, occupying the same space as the Document and Fragment
trees.

When you create a new project in SmartEdit Writer four folders will
be created inside the Research tree. They are Bookmarks,
Characters, Images and Documents & Files. If you are opening a
project created using version 1 of SmartEdit Writer you will have to
add these or other folders yourself. The four default folders are a
guide only. You can rename them, drag and drop them to different
locations, delete them or add new folders that better suit your
requirements.
Add Image — Ctrl+Shift+M
Clicking the Add Image button, or choosing the same option from the tree’s right click menu, opens a
standard File Open dialog. From here you can select any number of image files to import from your PC into
your project. Each image will appear in the tree under the selected item and will have the same name as their
original file. After import, you may decide to rename some of the images by using the standard tree rename
option (F2 shortcut).

Double clicking an image file in the tree will open that image in your default image viewer — this will vary
depending on which software you have installed on your PC. In my case it’s IrfanView.

Once added, image files are copied into the project folder. The originals remain where they are.

Add Bookmark — Ctrl+Shift+B

A bookmark is a link to a web page. Bookmarks can be attached to anything in the Research tree — to
folders, scenes, files, notes, even other bookmarks. They are a handy way of storing quick links to webpages
that have a bearing on your project. They can be links to Wikipedia pages, to online galleries, to books on
Amazon, to Facebook pages, to forum posts, to anything online.

SmartEdit Writer does not copy any contents from web pages you bookmark. It simply maintains the web
addresses and opens that page in your default web browser when you double click the bookmark in the tree.

The sample project shown above contains bookmarks to different pages on Wikipedia.

Add File — Ctrl+Shift+L

Adding a file works in the very same way as adding an image. The only difference is the icon that appears
inside the Research tree after you import. Where possible, the imported file will show an icon common to its
file type. If you choose any Word or other text documents to import they will be converted into scenes as
part of the import process and can be edited inside SmartEdit Writer.

As with images the files you add are copied into the project, which means the originals remain untouched.

External files imported into your SmartEdit Writer project can be quite large, so they are not backed up
when you click the backup button or as part of Automatic Backups. Single images taken with a digital
camera could easily be 10 megabytes in size, and video files could be over a gigabyte in size. Allowing
these files into your daily backups would fill up your hard drive or Cloud storage folder in a few weeks. You
can read more about how to make a backup of your Research files here.
Menus and Toolbars
– An Overview

There are five toolbars in SmartEdit Writer, each focusing on a particular area of the app. Depending on
what you’re doing a particular toolbar may automatically open. Each toolbar is shown below with a brief
description of what its buttons do. Fuller explanations of many of the features mentioned can be found in
other Knowledge Base topics.

Project

The Project toolbar is where you navigate around your project and add new items to that project. You can
open the Start page, choose whether the Document or research trees are visible in the left and right sections,
and open the Notes, Daily Word Count and SmartEdit sections.

There are also buttons to add new scenes, notes, folders, bookmarks and images to any of the active trees,
and to move items between your Document and Fragment trees.

Word Processor

The Word Processor toolbar contains all the available word processing options such as text and paragraph
formatting, copy and pasting options, as well as table and image creating and inserting. All the options on
this toolbar relate to the currently open and active note or scene. You can print a scene, export that scene out
of SmartEdit Writer as a Word document, run a spell check and change the page layout.

Actions & Tools

The Actions & Tools toolbar contains a wide selection of stand-alone options. You can open the Project
Manager, run the various word count options on a scene or on your entire document, make an external
backup and export all of your scenes as a single Word document, or print the structure of your active
Document, Research or Fragments tree.
 A new feature accessible from this toolbar is the “Search
for Character Name” button which opens a dialog listing a
host of names from many different countries. From this
dialog you can choose a country and a gender, and browse
through the many auto-generated names to find one that
suits a character you are working on.

A right click menu exists that allows you to copy any

selected names, after which you can paste them into a scene
or note.

Further buttons on the Actions & Tools toolbar allow you to

import a Word document or a folder of documents into your
project, to open the project Settings dialog and to go to the
Share page on the SmartEdit website where you can share
links to SmartEdit on social media.

SmartEdit Editor

The SmartEdit Editor toolbar contains all the novel editing functionality of SmartEdit Writer. From here you
can run checks for word and phrase repetition on your current scene or on your entire Document. You can
run adverb or proper noun checks on all the dialogue in your novel or only on your prose and you can
navigate around the various results and update the Editor settings and exclusion lists.

Help

The Help toolbar provides links to all of the SmartEdit resources online. This includes the website, the
support forum and direct links to each section in the online Knowledge Base. You can also open the About
Dialog and check for updates, and sign up to the SmartEdit mailing list — very important if you want to be
kept informed of changes and new SmartEdit releases.
The Word Processor
The Word Processor in SmartEdit Writer has all of the basic and mid-level features that you would expect
from a word processor such as Microsoft Word. Many of these features are accessible only via shortcut keys
— the same shortcuts as Word. They do not all appear on the toolbar.
What I tried to do with the word processor design is to limit the visible options to only the basics, all of
which have a button on the main Word Processor toolbar. From here you can adjust the fonts, change text
formatting to bold or italic, indent paragraphs, adjust line spacing — basic, everyday functionality that all
users might use at one point or another. Icons for these buttons should all be familiar to you.

More advanced word processing features such as multi-level lists, advanced table designs and headers and
footers are not available. The word processor has been designed with creative writers in mind. Features
mentioned above are rarely, if ever, used by fiction writers, at least in the initial draft stage.

While it’s true that a polished manuscript that you are sending to a publisher might need headers and page
numbers, unusual formatting, and even the ability to track changes, SmartEdit Writer does not contain any
of these. When you reach the polishing and formatting stage, you need to look to a more suitable tool such
as Word.

So what does the SmartEdit Writer word processor allow? Text justification, underlining, simple bullet and
numbered lists, font and colour changes, insertion of special symbols that are not on your keyboard, like
copyright or trademark symbol and Unicode characters, copy and paste — with a Paste Special option so
that you can paste without any formatting — simple tables and image insertion, as well as full paragraph
spacing options, accessible from the paragraph button on the toolbar and the right click Paragraph option.

You’ll also find a dialog containing the full range of Font options by using the Ctrl+D shortcut, and a Find
and Replace dialog, accessible from the toolbar buttons and the commonly used Ctrl+F shortcut.
You can Zoom in and out, making the word processor larger to suit your needs or screen resolution without
adjusting the font size. The zoom feature is universal and applies to all open scenes and notes in the project.
It is maintained after you close and re-open a project, allowing you to set up a working environment that
fully meets your working style and requirements.

A number of options relating to the word processor are accessible on the Settings dialog (Actions & Tools
toolbar). From here, you can set default font and paragraph settings for all new scenes and notes, as well as
switch smart quotes and em dashes off or on.
A full spell checker exists for the English language and its regional variations. I go into that in detail in the
next topic, but for the time being, be aware that the live spell checker (the red underline), can be switched on
or off from the “Live Spelling” button on the word processor toolbar.

If you’re looking for an option in the word processor that you can’t find, don’t forget to try the shortcut keys
that you might have used previously in your old word processor. There’s a good chance the feature is there,
simply not accessible from the toolbar.
Word is a great word processor, but it’s overly complicated for creative writing, especially in the early
stages. The multitude of options available can be a distraction for the writer at a time when getting words
down on paper is what’s important. I’ve tried to eliminate this by cutting down on visible options, and
showing only the basic, commonly used functionality on a single toolbar.
The Spell Checker and Associated Features
Spell checking is a must-have feature for all word processors, and even though I prefer to do my first draft
writing with the live spell checker switched off, I still felt it was a requirement for version 1 of SmartEdit
Writer. Not all writers share my distaste with correcting spelling as you type.
The first time you open the sample “Huckleberry Finn” project, the live spell checker (red underline) will be
switched on, but only for English language users. If your regional settings are set to any non-English
language, the spell checker is off by default, as we have not yet incorporated non-English dictionaries.

English language dictionaries are included for all the common spelling variations of English: American, UK
and Ireland, Canada, Australia and South Africa. Which dictionary your version of SmartEdit Writer uses is
determined by the Windows settings on your PC, but you can override this by changing the dictionary from
the Spelling Options dialog, discussed below.

As with Microsoft Word, a custom dictionary exists that you can add words to as you work so that they are
not marked as misspelled. The first time SmartEdit Writer is opened it will copy your Microsoft Word
custom dictionary if it can find one, so that any words you had already whitelisted in Word will be
whitelisted in SmartEdit Writer as well.

An autocorrect feature is built in and switched on by default. You will be familiar with this from Word and
other word processors. It’s the underlying functionality that converts typos as you type, correcting “teh” to
“the” and such. Similarly, there is an auto function that capitalises the first word in each new sentence as
you type. These and other options can be changed or switched off by opening the Spelling Options dialog,
accessible from the main Spelling dialog.
There is no thesaurus in SmartEdit Writer. I might add one down the road at some point, or I may decide to
connect the software to an existing online thesaurus. I’ve never been sold on built-in thesauruses in word
processors, preferring to use online variations where possible, so don’t hold your breath on this particular
feature being added any time soon. I’ve always viewed the built-in thesauruses as a complex feature that few
writers use — a bit like the built in sat-navs in cars that look outdated from day one, unable to compete with
the slicker smartphone apps that change every few months.

Writers writing in languages other than English may find the absence of spell checking dictionaries in their
language to be a deterrence. I do plan to add new languages to SmartEdit Writer, but slowly, over time.
Your Daily Word Count
Keep a daily word count, set targets, and share the results online in graphs and charts.

There are writers who keep track of how much they write each day and there are writers who don’t. For
some, a daily word count is a measure of success and achievement; a sign that progress — however slow —
is being made. Starting in version 3, SmartEdit Writer keeps track of the daily word count for your project.
With version 5 we introduced SmartEdit Writer’s online charts — set monthly word count targets and share
your progress in a graphical display on Facebook or Twitter.
A range of Word Count options exists on the Actions & Tools menu.

At a basic level, you can quickly call up a word count for the scene you’re working on, or for every scene in
your Document or Fragments. If your project is structured in such a way that all scenes that will be in your
novel are sitting somewhere in your Document tree, then choosing “All Scenes in Document” from the
Word Count drop down will give you an accurate word count for your novel-in-progress. Notes are
excluded, as are scenes in your Fragments or Research trees.
Sitting next to the Word Count button is “Daily Word Count.” This opens a new section to the right of the
word processor — the same section where you normally see your notes. Clicking this button on or off will
switch the daily word count list on or off.
Word count totals are saved for that day when you close a project — or just
before midnight if you’re burning the midnight oil. The first time you open a
project in Version 3 of SmartEdit Writer no word count total will be set so
the list will be empty. You can force a word count to be taken by clicking
the “Refresh word count” button above the list. The example below is taken
from the Riders of the Purple Sage project.
Each day you open a project, a word count total is set for your Document
and Fragment trees. A daily count is calculated based on the total for today
less the total for yesterday. If today’s work consists of deleting 1,000 words
and writing 500 more, your count for that day will be 0.
The drop down above the list lets you choose which total you wish to see:
Document, Fragments, or Document & Fragments. You may have written a
number of scenes last week that you later moved to Fragments. Allowing for
fragment totals to be included means that even if you later decide to exclude
a scene from your finished novel, work done on those scenes still counts
towards daily totals. Project totals are at the very bottom of the list.
This is the first incarnation of what might become a more feature-rich
“Project Stats” section at some future point. A lot of information is being
stored, allowing for graphs, daily targets, calendars that show when targets
are met, etc. How extensive this section becomes depends a lot on user
feedback.
If you’re one of those writers who is repulsed by the very thought of storing daily word count information
— I’m sure there are many of you out there — you can switch this feature off by unchecking the “Keep a
daily word count” option on the Settings dialog.

Monthly Word Count Targets & Online Graphs

In September 2018 we released version 5 of SmartEdit Writer. This release built on the daily word count to
include monthly targets and online graphical results which you can easily share on Facebook and Twitter.
To get started with your first results graph, open the Daily Word Count section by clicking the button on the
toolbar mentioned above. Click the chart button to the right of the Document drop down and wait while your
page loads.

Stats for the current month are loaded from your project and sent to the SmartEdit Writer online app where a
unique page just for your project is created and opened.
The Charts page contains two sections, a summary of the work you’ve completed for the month to date
along with a graph showing a day by day breakdown — complete with colored bars to highlight which days
you achieved your daily target and which days you fell short. To consistently achieve your monthly targets
you should aim to reach the daily word count total each day — or do a weekend sprint to catch up!

The gauge at the top will be either green or red. Green means
you’re on track to reach your monthly target, red means you’re in
danger of missing that target. Each time you click the charts button
inside Atomic Scribbler your online charts are updated with the
latest word count figures (subject to Internet connection!).
It may be that you’re working so fast and furiously that you find
yourself well ahead of your targets, in which case the “Revised
daily target” figure shown above will change to show a lower daily
figure. This is based on your monthly target, your word count to
date and the number of days remaining in the month.
The second section of the charts page shows the day by day breakdown of your work in a simple bar chart,
one bar for each day of the month. The chart assumes a daily target equal to your monthly target divided by
the number of days in the month. If you meet the target for a particular day the bar is green, if you fail to
meet the target it is red.

Here’s a link to the Charts page for one of our sample projects “Riders of the Purple Sage” for September
2018. All appears to be going well, though there were some red days during the month.
By making the charts page a public page in the SmartEdit Writer online app, we’ve made it easy for you to
share with your friends and followers. Public accountability adds a new dimension to your daily work.

But it’s only public if you make it public. You need to share the page on Facebook, Twitter or on your
website for people to see it. There is no automatic link to this page, so Google will not find it unless you post
it somewhere. It’s yours and yours alone. You can delete it at any time from within SmartEdit Writer.

Configuring Your Monthly Charts

The Daily Word Count button on the toolbar contains a drop down menu with three options.

The first opens the daily count section on the right, the
second opens the online charts page for the current month,
and the third allows you to configure existing charts.

Click on the drop down button next to the chart you wish to
edit. From here you can open that chart online, delete the
chart or edit the chart. The Edit Chart dialog is where you
change the monthly word count target, change the name of
the Chart, or change the month and year.
 When you open a new chart for the current
month it will use the name of your project as
the title of the charts page. You may wish to
change this if the project or book name is not
yet public, and you can do so inside the Edit
Chart dialog without needing to change your
project name.
The default word count target per month is
20,000 words for most months of the year and
a whopping 50,000 words for November, in
anticipation of NaNoWriMo. Changing any of these values and reloading the charts page from within
SmartEdit Writer will update all the data, figures and graphs online for that month.

Online charts are monthly, which means each month brings a new chart with a new page of graphs.

How do I create a chart for a previous month?

Daily word counts were introduced back in March 2018. Figures will have been stored from this date unless
you switched off the daily count in the Settings dialog. To create a chart for a previous month, open the
Configure Charts dialog shown above and select Edit Chart from the drop down next to an existing chart. In
this dialog change the month and year to the desired month and year, then re-open that chart’s online page. It
will be updated with figures for the desired month.

Depending on feedback, we may expand the online charts to allow for a range of different options. If you
have something you’d like to see in the online charts, get in touch or bring it up on the forums The first
incarnation of SmartEdit Writer’s online charts is deliberately feature light and focused on monthly targets
in anticipation of NaNoWriMo.
Searching
Finding something in your project

A SmartEdit Writer project is not a single document. This is a point that I repeat a lot throughout this
Knowledge Base and reiterate in blog posts on a regular basis. Your SmartEdit Writer project is a collection
of small documents and files, all bound together by a simple database. Finding something in your project is
not as simple as running a basic Find operation in another word processor, but once you understand the three
different types of search, you’ll find it to be fast and easy to understand.

What can you search for?

You can search for a word or phrase and you can search for an item (scene, note, image, bookmark or file)
by name. You can search inside the currently open and active scene or note, you can search across all scenes
and notes, and you can search by name inside the currently active tree (Document, Fragments or Research
tree).

To choose a search type, click the drop down under the Find
button on the main toolbar and choose from the three options.

Searching inside the current scene or note

This opens a standard and easily recognisable

Find dialog where you can enter the text you
are looking for and choose from a limited
range of searching options. Only the currently
active scene or note is searched.

This operation looks and behaves similar to

Find operations in other word processors, and
is similar to the Microsoft Word Find in older
versions of the software.

The F3 shortcut key will allow you to jump to successive instances of the word or phrase you’re searching
for.
Searching across your entire project

It looks basic, displaying a simple textbox and a single checkbox. To

get started type your word or phrase into the textbox and hit the enter
(return key). The search will begin immediately and you should start
seeing results as soon as they are found.

Unlike the more basic Find discussed previously, the project level find
opens every scene and note in your project — regardless of which
section it might be in — and searches for each occurrence of the
specified word or phrase. It then displays a result list that comprises
the paragraph containing the search phrase, with the phrase
highlighted in bold.

The screenshot on the left shows the results after searching for “Huck”
in the sample Huckleberry Finn project. Selecting any one result will
immediately open that scene or note and jump to the first occurrence of
the search phrase in that paragraph.

At the top of the results list are three links: Document, Fragments and
Research. Clicking any one of these will change the results list to show
only those results from a particular section of your project. The default
section is the Document tree, as these are the results most commonly
sought.
What if you don’t want to search inside everything in your project?
You may only wish to look inside your Document scenes, as these are
the scenes that form part of your final manuscript. To only look inside
these scenes, check the “Search Document Scenes only” checkbox and
re-run the search.

The project search results list is structured in such a way that you can
see the context of each result before deciding to open the scene or not.
If you are looking for a particular instance of the search phrase, a quick
eyeball of the results list is usually sufficient to locate the single
instance you’re looking for, at which point you can click on the result,
open that scene and make whatever changes you need to make.
Searching by item name

What if you’re not looking for a word or phrase within a scene? What if you you’re looking for a scene
somewhere on your Document tree that you named “huck …?” As your project grows you may find that you
have hundreds of scenes, notes and folders in your project, many with similar names.

From the Find button drop down, select Find in Tree. This will open a search box at the very top of the
active tree (Document, Fragments or Research). The Ctrl+F shortcut keys will also work as long as the tree
is currently selected. All you have to do is begin typing and the tree will be filtered based on the characters
you type in. For example, typing “Huck” into the search box for the Document tree in the Huckleberry Finn
project will give three results as shown below, inside their parent folders for context.

You may need to open any closed folders if you can’t see the
item, and you can close the results tree and return to the full
Document, Fragments or Research tree by clicking the Close
button next to the search box.
These three different types of search cover all of your project
and allow you to quickly find anything you’re looking for,
either by word or phrase, or by name.
Automatic Backups and Automatic Saving
Every writer has a horror story about losing their work. In some cases it’s a full novel lost when their only
Word document goes up in smoke, in others it’s a less traumatic but still significant loss of a day’s work
when something goes wrong with their PC.
SmartEdit Writer has a number of features built in to lessen the impact of these sorts of occurrences. While I
couldn’t do anything about a complete hard drive implosion, I could add a few carefully built processes to
make it less likely that you will lose any work through human error or forgetfulness, and to mitigate the
effects of any software or even hardware issues that might occur.

Firstly, all of your work in a SmartEdit Writer project is saved as you work. When you add a scene, move a
folder around, rename something — saving happens there and then. When you write a paragraph or chapter,
write a note, edit your work — saving happens within a minute of that change. You never have to click a
save button as you do in Word. This is all automated and outside your control.

Some users like the save button in Word. They like to have control over when a save action occurs. This is
often born from a mistrust of the software. They do this because something happened one time 10 years ago
and they no longer trust the software to do its job. You need to trust SmartEdit Writer to save your work for
you.

At the top right of the main SmartEdit Writer window you’ll find a small save icon tucked away under the
close button. When this is blue, it means the word processor has not yet saved its most recent changes. When
it’s greyed out, those changes have been saved. If you have any trust issues with SmartEdit Writer, keep an
eye on this icon and you’ll see it change from blue to grey as a save occurs.

You can — if you really, really want to — force the issue by clicking the little icon when it’s blue, but this is
not necessary. When you close a scene or note in your project, it saves any changes. When you close a
project, all outstanding changes are saved.

At the project level, an automatic backup feature exists that saves all editable files in your project to a zip
file every time you close that project. But this only happens once you have configured automatic backups.
To do this, open the Settings dialog from the Actions & Tools menu and click on Automatic Backups.
Check the box marked “Create a backup every time I close a project”, click the browse button and select the
folder or location you want to save that backup to. In the example above I have set my backup location to
“C:\Dropbox\SmartEdit Writer Projects”, a folder that I created inside my Dropbox folder.

Setting the automatic backup location to a cloud storage folder is a great idea as it ensures that even after a
complete hard drive crash your projects will have been backed up to the cloud. If you do choose a cloud
folder, as I have done here, you need to ensure that your cloud storage is backing itself up with frequency,
and that you have an Internet connection up and running to allow this. SmartEdit Writer will save a zip file
backup to the location you specify, but it’s up to your cloud storage provider to carry out any automated
syncing with the cloud.

There are two further options available to you when configuring automatic backups. Selecting the “Only
keep one backup of each project per day” checkbox will ensure that only a single backup remains in your
backup folder at the end of the day for each project. While a backup is taken each time you close the project,
that day’s backup will be overwritten each time. If you open and close your projects a lot, this will ensure
that you don’t have an abundance of backups clogging up your backups folder.

The final option, “Exclude this project from automatic backups” is a project specific setting. You may wish
to have automatic backups switched on for most projects, but not for all projects — older, archived projects
for example, where you no longer make changes but only open them to read or research old material.

When you set up the automatic backup folder, it makes a backup every time you close a project. This means
that if you haven’t opened a project in a month, the last backup will be a month ago. It’s a good idea to open
and close each project once after you first set up the backup location, as this will force a backup in each
case.
Backups contain the name of the folder that contains your project as well as a timestamp for the date of the
backup. In the case of a project called “Harry Potter”, a backup will be created called “harry-potter-2017-10-
06”, because the [backup] day is the 6th of October, 2017.
To extract a project from a backup, you should open the zip file (a double click will usually do this), extract
the contents to a new folder, then double click the atomic.scribbler file inside the new folder.

Note: Files and images added to the Research tree are not backed up as part of the backup process. There
are two reasons for this. Firstly, these files can be very large. Your Research tree may contain multiple
image files as well as videos or other large files. It’s quite possible for the size of your Research files to
reach hundreds of megabytes. Backing up this content every time you close a project would quickly fill up
your hard drive or cloud storage limit. Secondly, none of these files are created or edited inside SmartEdit
Writer.

A backup will contain all the names and positions of these entries in the Research tree, as well as full
information on bookmarks, but it will not contain any actual Research files.

If you wish to back up the Research files, you can do

so by copying the “Files” folder inside the SmartEdit
Writer project folder, shown on the left.

If you’re new to SmartEdit Writer, the first thing you

should do is set up Automatic backups as outlined
above.
Version 7 of SmartEdit Writer introduced a second automated backup feature called Fail-Safe backups. You
can read more about Fail-Safe backups and how they can be used to recover lost work in this blog post.
Customising the User Interface
The user interface of SmartEdit Writer has been set up in a particular way. Chapters, scenes and notes are
stored on the left, the main tabbed word processor sits in the middle, and research and notes open to the right
(along with your daily word counts). This basic structure will be maintained as we add new features to the
software over the coming year.
On the Word Processor toolbar, there are options to Zoom in or out, enlarging the word processor or making
it smaller. There is also an ability to widen the Document Tree and the Notes section by dragging the
separator to the left or right. These are project wide settings. Changes to any of these settings will be
maintained when you close and re-open a project. You should spend a little time configuring your look and
feel, and be confident that SmartEdit Writer will adopt these changes every time it opens that project.

At the top right of the SmartEdit Writer window, next to the minimise button, there is a fourth button that
opens a drop down menu. The options available in this drop down are:
“Auto-hide Ribbon”, “Show Tabs”, and “Show Tabs and Commands”.

Selecting from these options along with closing the right and
left sections gives a close approximation of full screen writing.
This is an area we will probably add to in the future.
If you prefer to write on a dark background, you’ll find a “Use dark theme” option on the first page of the
Settings dialog. Selecting this option will switch all of Atomic Scribbler over to a dark theme, allowing you
to write white (-ish) text on a dark gray background.

If you do enable the dark theme, you’ll need to be careful about copying and pasting from Word documents
or websites into a scene. In these cases you should use the “Paste Special” option on the toolbar and select
“Unformatted Text” from the options available. If you paste formatted text into a dark themed page, you’ll
end up with different colored fonts, as formatted text carries font color information of its own into your
scene. This is a limitation that every word processor with dark themes faces, and it’s the price you pay for
that dark background.
Importing Word documents
A new SmartEdit Writer project contains a couple of folders and sample scenes — nothing more. If you’re
new to SmartEdit Writer, chances are you will have been working on existing projects using some other
software such as Microsoft Word. The quickest way to get to work on your existing project in SmartEdit
Writer is to import those documents.
There are two import options available to all users from the Actions & Tools menu — “Import Document”
and “Import from Folder.” The first allows you to import a single document, the second imports an entire
folder of documents. A third import option is available only to users who have PageFour installed on the
same PC as SmartEdit Writer. More on that at the end of this topic.

The document import is not restricted to Word documents. Document types that can be imported are docx
(Microsoft Word), odt (Open Office), rtf and txt (universal formats used by various software), and doc (the
old Microsoft Word format from way back).

To import one document, select the Import Document button and browse to the document you wish to
import. When a document is imported, a copy is made of the original. This copy is taken into the SmartEdit
Writer project and inserted at the top level. It will appear in your Document tree as the final scene in that
tree. You can then double click on it to open it, drag and drop to move it around, etc.

The document is not broken down in any way. If your starting point is a 20,000 word document then the new
scene with the same name will contain all 20,000 words. It’s up to you to break down that document into
smaller scenes by copying and pasting into new scenes, creating folders and such.

Importing Folders of Documents

If you have a number of documents you wish to import, select the “Import from Folder” button. This will
prompt you to browse to the folder you wish to import. Once you select a folder, a dialog will pop up listing
all the folders and documents that are being imported from your source folder. Any documents that are
among the permitted types mentioned above will be imported. Any folders found inside the source folder
will be created inside your SmartEdit Writer project, and any documents they contain will be imported.
There is no limit to the number of documents that can be imported into a project.

Documents inside the source folder that cannot be imported will show a red X beside them in the dialog.
Documents that are successfully imported will show a green tick. Once the import process is complete, a
message will pop up advising you. You should then close the dialog, after which your Document Tree will
be refreshed with all the newly imported documents.

As with importing a single document, your original documents and folders are left untouched — copies are
made as they are brought into the SmartEdit Writer project. Each Windows folder is now a folder in your
project and each document is now a scene. The order in which the folders and scenes appear is the order in
which they were read from your source folder. You may wish to drag and drop them around in order to
structure your Document Tree better, or to break down some large scenes into smaller ones using copy and
paste.
Importing PageFour Notebooks

I mentioned earlier that an “Import PageFour Notebooks” button will appear for any user that has PageFour
installed on their PC. This is to allow you to import entire PageFour Notebooks easily. To use this option,
click the button of the same name. A dialog will pop up with a list of all PageFour Notebooks on your PC.
Select the Notebook you wish to import and click the Import button.

From this point on the process follows that of the folder import process outlined above. All of your
PageFour folders and pages will be imported into the SmartEdit Writer project. Each page will become a
scene.

Any pages that you had password protected will not be imported, as SmartEdit Writer has no mechanism for
opening password protected files.
Exporting Your Finished Novel to a Word Document
The file format used by SmartEdit Writer is docx, which is the Microsoft Word document format. Each
scene you write is saved to its own small Word document. But individual scenes are of no use to you when
the time comes to send your finished manuscript to an editor, publisher or beta reader. You need a single
Word document.

Compiling all of your scenes into one document in SmartEdit Writer is easy. All you have to do is click on
the “Export as a Single Document” button on the Actions & Tools menu and choose a document name and
location. A single Word document is immediately created.

How is this document produced?

SmartEdit Writer goes through your Document Tree from top to bottom and adds each scene it finds, in
order, to a new document. This new document is then saved to the file and location you specified. Folder
names are ignored and notes are ignored. Only scenes are added to the new document, and they are always
added in the order they appear in the Document Tree.

Before you export your work, take a look at your Document Tree and ensure that the order of the scenes is
correct and that no scenes are in the tree that you do not want to appear in your exported document. If
something is in the wrong order — Chapter 8 before Chapter 7 for example — use drag and drop to move
them around so that they are in the right place. If a scene you no longer want to include in your Document is
in the tree, right click on it and Move it to Fragments. Anything in your Fragment tree is ignored when you
export as a single document.

In version 1 of SmartEdit Writer, the export option is basic. It does not contain any functionality beyond
joining your scenes together. This means you may have to open the exported document in Word or in
another word processor and polish off any rough edges. For example, you may have used different fonts in
different scenes. You may require page breaks in certain places, etc.

In future versions of SmartEdit Writer, the export functionality is likely to be expanded to handle many of
these situations, delivering a more polished final document, but for version 1, my focus was on delivering a
simple export.
Working on multiple PCs

SmartEdit Writer works best if you are working on a single PC. It’s not cloud based software that syncs to a
third party cloud provider such as Dropbox. It’s not a web solution that runs in your browser like Google
Docs. It’s not a single document editor such as Microsoft Word, where all you have to do to work on
multiple devices is copy or share that single document.
If multi-PC or multi-device use is one of your must haves for writing software, then do not choose
SmartEdit Writer. Pick a web solution with a yearly charge, or a single document solution such as Word, or
a package that offers built in syncing with one or more cloud solutions such as Dropbox.
Having said that, you can copy and share SmartEdit Writer projects, and it’s not that difficult. But… if
you’re non-technical in nature, don’t know what a file is, don’t know what Windows explorer is, then you
will find it difficult to copy those projects, as SmartEdit Writer projects are not single files like Microsoft
Word documents, and there is no simple “Save as…” menu to allow you to copy a project.
If the above describes you, you should content yourself with working on your project on a single PC, or
choose one of the alternative offerings for writing such as Google Docs that come with multi device use
built in.
SmartEdit Writer projects can contain may hundreds or even thousands of small files, all sitting inside a
single project folder, and all connected by a small project database. This project folder is your project.
Single files inside that folder cannot be accessed without the surrounding project. The default location for
your projects is your “Documents/SmartEdit Writer” folder. For any project you create, a new folder will be
created here, or in another destination you choose.

How you should NEVER open a SmartEdit Writer Project

Never create a SmartEdit Writer project inside a cloud folder such as Dropbox. If you do this, and if you
then open your project on more than one PC before Dropbox has correctly finished syncing, you will corrupt
your project and you will risk losing work as a result. Do not do this.
Never open the same project twice at the same time. There are built in measures to prevent you doing this,
but you should be aware that any workarounds you might try to enable this will result in problems.

How you should work on SmartEdit Writer projects on more than one PC
Option 1. Create your project on a shared drive such as a USB stick, a plug in drive or a network drive. In
this way, when you finish working on your project on one PC, you can shut down SmartEdit Writer, remove
the USB device and plug it into a second PC. If you use this method, ensure that SmartEdit Writer is closed
before removing the USB device, otherwise final changes might not be saved.
Option 2. Click the Backup button on the Actions & Tools menu and backup your current project to a zip
file. You can then copy this zip file to another PC, email it and open it on another PC, or share it via a cloud
folder. When you then open the ZIP file on the other PC, you should extract it to an empty folder and then
double click the atomic.scribbler file inside the project folder to open the project. NEVER overwrite an
existing folder, as doing so runs the risk of mixing two SmartEdit Writer projects and causing corruption.

Copying all of your SmartEdit Writer Projects from one PC to Another

As mentioned earlier, the default location of your SmartEdit Writer projects is your “Documents/SmartEdit
Writer” folder. If you wish to move all of your projects to another PC, you should start by copying the
contents of this folder from the first PC to the second.
If you had created or copied projects to a different location on your PC, you should locate these projects and
copy the entire folders to the next PC. For example, a project called “Huck Finn” that you created in a
“C:\Writing” folder will exist inside a folder called “C:\Writing\Huck Finn”. To copy this project you must
copy the “Huck Finn” folder in its entirety.
As we can be forgetful about things such as where we chose to save a particular project to, you should
always save SmartEdit Writer projects to their default location of “Documents/SmartEdit Writer” unless you
are saving to a plug in drive. This way, you always know where the projects are.
To summarise the above, SmartEdit Writer works best if you work on a project on a single PC. If you must
work on a project on more than one PC, ensure you have the Windows knowledge to be able to copy folders
and files, otherwise refrain from doing so, and maybe look at different solution than SmartEdit Writer to
meet your writing needs. Finally, never, under any circumstances, create or open a SmartEdit Writer project
from within a cloud folder.
What is SmartEdit Editor?
SmartEdit Editor helps you edit your novel. While SmartEdit Writer is very new software — first released in
late 2017 — Editor has existed as a Microsoft Word Add-In for many years. In 2018 we built an Add-In for
SmartEdit Writer containing the same functionality as the Word version.

What does SmartEdit Editor do?

It runs a series of checks on your entire document and highlights areas that you might want to look at.
Unlike other editing software it does not make suggestions for improvement or tell you what to change. The
assumption is that the writer is the creative force behind the work and that the writer makes all decisions
about what to change.
SmartEdit Editor presents its findings to you in a simple list to the right of the word processor, complete
with the sentence in which the result was found for context. If you choose to make a change, all you have to
do is double click the result and the scene will be opened and the sentence highlighted for you so you can
begin work.

What exactly does SmartEdit Editor help with and identify:

 Word and phrase repetition

 All adverbs used in your work
 Words and phrases that you choose to highlight, such as common typos or characters you might want
to keep an eye on
 Redundancies such as “he fell down” as opposed to falling up
 Misused words and homonyms in your document such as “new” and “knew”, “less than” and “fewer
than” which can occur through typos or through misunderstanding the word
 Clichés
 All dialogue tags used — a great way to see any unusual tags that you’ve been using
 Every proper noun — useful to keep track of names and to ensure that old names that you’ve
changed aren’t lingering somewhere in chapter 22
 All acronyms — handy for spotting inconsistencies such as FBI and F.B.I.
 It highlights all use of what I call risqué words and phrases - those words that you know will
probably offend someone. Which is not to say you should be changing them, but it can be a great
help if you want to remove profanity from a character’s dialogue if you change that character and
how they speak
 Words and phrases used to begin sentences. Are you starting a host of sentences with “And then…”
 Shows you all your extra-long sentences. The Zane Grey sample novel we use for illustration has one
sentence with 92 words.
 A host of punctuation types are highlighted, such as semi-colons and colons, EM and EN dashes,
multiple periods, inconsistent spaces, exclamation marks and much more.

You can run these checks as a whole on your entire document or individually against a single scene. It all
depends on how you work and how you prefer to edit.

The screenshot on the next page shows the Adverb results for Riders of the Purple Sage. Bear in mind that
this is a published novel from a well-known author. Try running a first-draft through SmartEdit Editor and
see what it finds.
Running SmartEdit Editor for the First Time

Editor is an editing tool for creative writers that sits inside SmartEdit Writer. It helps you as you edit your
novel or short story by drawing your attention to words, phrases or sentences in your document that you
might want to re-visit. It does not instruct you. It does not tell you to change something. It does not offer
alternatives or suggestions.

Cast your eye over these buttons but do not dig too deeply just yet. I’ll go through them all over the course
of this post. For now, ensure you have an open project that contains some content— preferably fiction —
select the “Check Document” button on the toolbar if it’s not already selected and click the Repetitions
button.

After a few seconds the results for the first of the two check
you’ve just run — Repeated Words — will appear. In the
example on the left — and throughout this website — we’re
showing results for Zane Grey’s novel Riders of the Purple
Sage. You may not have any interest in westerns, but we
needed a full length novel that was in the public domain and
was not written in the Victorian style.
At the top is a list of words with a count next to them. This is a
complete list of every word in every scene of your Document
tree, alongside the number of occurrences.
Click on any one row in this list and the section below will be
populated by every sentence that contains that particular word.
In the example above, I selected the 85 instances of strange.
Straight away, with no waiting, I can see every use of that
word in my document, with the word strange highlighted in
bold.
The purpose of this expanded sentence section is to show you
the context of your use of the word, allowing you to decide if
you need to make a change or not without even entering your
Document or scenes.
And here’s the best part: double clicking on one of these
sentence results will immediately jump into the word
processor, opening the scene if it’s not already open, and take
you to that sentence for you to edit.
Every results list in SmartEdit Editor works in the following
way:
A list of things Editor found (word and phrase repetition,
adverbs, clichés, redundancies, dialogue tags, crutch words,
etc.), alongside every sentence they appeared in, with the
ability to jump straight into the relevant scene and get to work
if required.
As you work through the SmartEdit Editor results, ignoring some things, making changes in response to
others, you may find that changes you make in one area are having a negative effect in another. You replace
one over-used phrase with another, improving things in one sentence while making them worse somewhere
else. For this reason, it’s a good idea to refresh the results list every now and then as you work.

You can do this by selecting the Refresh button in the top right-hand corner of the results list. This re-runs
the current check only.

Proximity of Results
When you work through the word and phrase repetition results, it can be useful to know how close one result
is to another. The listed results appear in order, starting at the beginning of your document and continuing to
the end.

An option exists on the Settings dialog to show the

paragraph number of each result to the right of that
result. This is useful in that it shows how close
together two consecutive results are.

The screenshot on the left shows the phrase repetition results

with the phrase near at hand highlighted. I’ve switch on the
paragraph number setting, so I can now see that the instances of
this phrase are scattered across my scenes, in paragraphs 235,
385, 394, etc. I might decide to look more closely at the second,
third and fourth instances, as they are quite close together.

How far apart they actually are depends on the size of your
paragraphs, but as a rule of thumb assume 10-15 paragraphs per
page. Showing the paragraph number in this way makes it easier
to read through the results list without having to enter the
document itself to check how far apart two results might be.

The paragraph number is only shown for the word and phrase
repetition results, though we may change this in the future.
Exclusion Lists
The first time you use SmartEdit Editor it will check everything in your Document tree, folder or scene —
depending on which you selected — unfiltered. But every novel has words and phrases that are part and
parcel of the work. In a Harry Potter novel, you wouldn’t be interested in how often Harry or school
appeared. You can train SmartEdit Editor to ignore certain results, results that you know are not significant.

To do this select a result such as the 92 occurrences of the word water in the above results list and click the
“Add Result to Exclusion List” button on the SmartEdit Editor toolbar. From that point on, no results will be
shown in the Repeated Words list for the word water. Every results list has this option and every exclusion
list can be edited later to add or remove entries in bulk. The Settings dialog has an option to switch
individual exclusion lists on or off, so you can always run a complete check, ignoring the exclusions if you
so choose.

The screenshot below shows the default entries in the exclusion list for Repeated Words.

Common words are included alongside some specific entries I made for the Zane Grey novel I’ve been
using, such as Jane, Jerry and Lassiter. It’s worth pointing out that most Editor checks are not case sensitive.
The exceptions are the Proper Nouns and Acronyms results which extracts values based on their case.

You should now have a basic understanding of how SmartEdit Editor checks and results work and how you
work with them. At this point it would be useful to run some of the other checks and examine the varied
results they present to you.
The image below shows a further list of checks SmartEdit Editor runs independent of the repetition checks.
You can run these one at a time by selecting from the menu, or all at once by clicking the Word & Phrase
Usage button.

Sentence checks include a host of punctuation monitors such as your use of semi-colons and colons, EM
dashes, excessive exclamation marks, alongside a check that extracts sentences of varying lengths so you
can quickly identify long sentences.
A final check that I will highlight is the “User defined monitored words.” This is where you specify your
crutch words, words and phrases that you know you make mistakes or typos on, or simply words that you
wish to keep an eye on.

Click on the Monitored Words button on the toolbar. The dialog

that pops up allows you to add new words and to remove words
you have no interest in.

In the example on the left, I’ve chosen to keep an eye on a few

character names along with some potentially embarrassing typos
that creep in when I’m typing too fast. The results list for these
words allows me to eyeball each instance, satisfy myself that no
mistakes have been made, and move on.

And that’s all there is to SmartEdit Editor. You decide what’s

important. You decide which, if any, changes you wish to make.
And you train Editor so it knows what to ignore and what to
draw your attention to.
SmartEdit Editor never alters your scenes directly. There are no
automated changes made, which means there is never any danger
of your work becoming corrupted or damaged. All the actual
editing work is done by you inside SmartEdit Writer.
Overview of SmartEdit Editor checks
— adverbs, dialogue tags, homonyms, etc.

In the “Running SmartEdit Editor for the first time” topic I looked in a little detail at the word and phrase
repetition checks and gave an overview of how the results lists worked. All the results lists in SmartEdit
Editor look, feel and work in the same way. If you haven’t read the previous two topics, you should do so
before continuing.

The button and menu options on the SmartEdit Editor toolbar allow you to run individual checks or groups
of checks. If you wish to run every check on every scene in your Document tree you can do so by selecting
“Check Document” and then clicking the “Run all Checks” button. On an 80,000 document, you should
expect this to take a couple of minutes. For a smaller, short story sized work, maybe 20 seconds or so.

If you wish to run the checks against a single scene or a folder of scenes, you should choose either “Check
Scene” or “Check Folder” before running the checks.

After completing the checks, the results section will open inside SmartEdit Writer to the right of the word
processor and the first set of results will be visible. This will usually be the Repeated Words list. You can
navigate to a different results list by opening the drop down and choosing different results, or by clicking the
left or right arrows as shown below.

Whatever checks you choose to run, you have the option of running those checks against your entire
document (dialogue and prose), prose only or dialogue only. The default is your entire document, but you
can select Prose or Dialogue from the toolbar buttons shown below. This is a feature that is used by some
writers to run a series of checks on character dialogue, or to exclude that dialogue from any results.

For example, you may wish to keep a check on adverbs in your prose and may not be interested in adverbs
used by your characters in speech. Or you may wish to seek out clichés in dialogue only.
 Let’s take a look at some of the results produced by
SmartEdit Editor for “Riders of the Purple Sage,”
beginning with adverbs. Many writers attempt to limit their
use of adverbs and Editor provides a quick and easy way of
checking each adverb for overuse and fixing the problem
there and then.

Zane Grey makes heavy use of adverbs in this novel, the

second most common is suddenly. Here we can see a list of
all 52 sentences where he uses the word.

As with the word and phrase results lists, double clicking

on any one of these sentences will jump into the scene that
contains the sentence where you can make a change. The
results list usually shows a long enough context for you to
decide there and then if a change is required.

A redundancy is when you use more words than required. An example might be “fall down” or “the color
red”, as opposed to “fall” and “red.” The redundancies check in SmartEdit Editor works from a
comprehensive list of redundancies and highlights each one in your document.

Unlike adverbs, the Zane Grey novel was light on redundancies.

Contemporary novels that I’ve run through SmartEdit Editor —
especially unpublished novels — are far more prone to excessive
redundancies.
The dialogue tags checker is useful in tracking down over-
use of unusual tags. The context sentences shown next to
each result are very clear and highlight potential issues that
should be obvious to any writer.
The general feeling in 2018 amongst those who call
themselves experts on writing is that any dialogue tag apart
from said should be removed or made to explain itself.
That doesn’t appear to have been the case way back when
our sample novel was published, as evidenced by all the
muttering, crying and interrupting going on.

The Proper Nouns results shows a list of all proper nouns

found in your document. They will often be character
names, place names, company names and such. The
example below shows a lot of different variations of
character names, such as Withersteen, Miss Withersteen
and Jane Withersteen — all the same person.

The proper nouns results list is useful for tracking down

mistakes after you change a character’s name. For
example: say you changed Fred Smith to John Smith and
there is no other character called Fred in your novel. If the
proper nouns results show an entry for Fred, you know
you’ve missed at least one occurrence and need to make a
change.

Extracting proper nouns is not a perfect science and

occasionally one may get bypassed or a word or phrase
may pop up that is not a proper noun. When this happens
it often means there is some unusual or incorrect
formatting in your document. For example: a missing
period which makes the first word of the next sentence
appear as if it were a proper noun as it is capitalized in the
middle of a sentence.
 The misused words (homonyms) check is one of the more
interesting checks in SmartEdit Editor and one of the least
pleasant to work through.

This check looks at pairs of words that are often confused

by writers, either as typos when they type the wrong word
by mistake, or as errors due to misunderstanding the word
or phrase itself.

It’s a difficult result list to work through as it can often

highlight your own imperfect understanding of the words
themselves, as you scratch your head and wonder which is
the correct one to use.

The screenshot on the left gives a good impression of the

types of words that are highlighted. In most cases there
will be no error, but you should go through the list
regardless, focusing on words that you know you often
mistype.

One of my own common misspellings in this area is

breathe/breath — not because I don’t know which one to
use, but because I type without looking at the screen and
for some reason have a habit of adding the ‘e’ when I
shouldn’t.

The acronyms check is probably not that useful for the majority of fiction writers, but if you’re working on a
thriller that contains a lot of acronyms — common with law enforcement and government agencies — it can
be useful in identifying inconsistencies. For example: CIA, C.I.A., etc.

If you’re new to SmartEdit Editor, I’d recommend running each of these checks individually by selecting
them from the Word & Phrase Usage drop-down and working out for yourself how useful a particular check
might be.
Sentence Structure & Punctuation

As before, if you haven’t read the Running SmartEdit Editor for the first time topic you should read that
before continuing.

The Sentence Start check is my own personal favorite of all the SmartEdit Editor checks. I designed it to
combat a deficiency in my own writing — a habit of latching on to certain crutch word and phrases and
using them to begin sentence after sentence. There’s nothing like seeing a long list of sentences beginning
with “And ” to make you hate the very sight of the word.

In Riders of the Purple Sage, Zane Grey appears to share

my fondness for the word, beginning 198 sentences with
the word And. He also has a liking for phrases such as He
had, used to open sentences 49 times.

It can be disheartening to see a list of sentences like the

ones above — unless the repetition is deliberate. But when
it demonstrates a reliance on words and phrases that you
were unaware of, resolving it can appear a daunting task.

But ask yourself this: Would you sooner not know about
the problem? Sooner stick your head in the sand and send
your finished manuscript — warts and all — out to editors
and publishers? Only to be rejected without even a note
telling you why. Your creative eye may not see what is
glaringly obvious to a computer program, but that doesn’t
mean the problems are not there.

This check is one you should definitely use in conjunction

with the exclusion lists. For example, you may not have
any interesting in seeing results for sentences beginning
with The, She, He, They, etc. In which case, select the
result and click the “Add Result to Exclusion List” button
and you’ll never see it again.
Prior to version 6 SmartEdit Editor produced a graph
showing the length of your sentences. It looked impressive,
with a highpoint around the 15-25 words mark and a dip
tapering off to single digits once the word count got above
40, but it wasn’t particularly practical.

Version 6 replaced that graph with a far more useful list,

showing you how many sentences had 10, 25 or 43 words,
and allowing you to see them there and then and edit them
in your document with a single click.

Our sample novel had a number of sentences with over 60

words and one with a whopping 92 words — worse than it
sounds, as it only contained a single semi-colon. But just as
significant is the large number of sentences containing 30-
50 words.
Punctuation Checks

The punctuation checks in SmartEdit Editor are not

designed to identify errors. As with other Editor checks
their purpose is to highlight areas that you might wish to
look at more closely. A semi-colon here and there might be
no problem. 261 semi-colons might not be so easy to brush
off — unless you’re John Irving.

Alongside examining your use of certain types of

punctuation, the Punctuation results lists are a good way to
pick up on actual problems with your document: a mixture
of curly and straight quotes, possible misuse of hyphens in
place of EN or EM dashes, multiple periods used where
you should be using an ellipsis, inconsistent spacing before
and after hyphens and other punctuation, etc.

The lists work in the same way as other SmartEdit Editor

lists. You select the results to examine, eyeball the
sentences to identify any errors, then jump into your Word
document by double clicking to fix the problem.
Shortcut keys in SmartEdit Writer
F1 Opens the GetHelp page on the SmartEdit Writer website

Navigation
F6 Opens the Document tree
F7 Opens the Fragments tree
F8 Opens the Research tree
Ctrl+Tab Move to the next word processor tab
Ctrl+Shift+Tab Move to the previous word processor tab

Adding new items

Ctrl+Shift+S Add a new scene
Ctrl+Shift+N Add a new note
Ctrl+Shift+D Add a new folder

Ctrl+Shift+M Add a new image [Research tree only]

Ctrl+Shift+B Add a new bookmark [Research tree only]
Ctrl+Shift+L Add a new file [Research tree only]

Searching
Ctrl+F When the word processor is active, opens the Find and Replace dialog
Ctrl+F When a tree is active, opens the Find in tree box at the top of the tree
Ctrl+Shift+F Opens the global search, so you can search in every scene and note

Tree — Document, Fragments and Research

F2 Renames the current tree item
Del Deletes the current tree item

Word Processor
Ctrl+G Moves the focus from the word processor to the current scene or note in the tree
Ctrl+W Closes the currently active scene
Ctrl+P Prints the active scene or note

Ctrl+A Select all text in scene or note

Ctrl+B Makes selected text bold
Ctrl+I Makes selected text italic
Ctrl+U Makes selected text underlined
Ctrl+Z Undo last change
Ctrl+Y Redo last change

Ctrl+X Cuts the selected text

Ctrl+C Copies the selected text
Ctrl+V Pastes the copied text
Word Processor cont'd
Ctrl+Shift+V Pastes the copied text as plain text (no formatting)
Ctrl+J Justifies the selected text
Ctrl+L Aligns the selected text to the left
Ctrl+R Aligns the selected text to the right
Shift+F3 Toggles the selected text between lower case, upper case and title case

Ctrl+F Opens the Find and Replace dialog

Ctrl+D Opens the font dialog

Ctrl+[ Increase the font size of selected text

Ctrl+] Decrease the font size of selected text

Ctrl+ Up Arrow Moves to beginning of paragraph

Ctrl+ Down Arrow Moves to end of paragraph

Ctrl+Del Deletes the word to the right of the cursor

Ctrl+Backspace Deletes the word to the left of the cursor
Ctrl+End Moves the cursor to the end of the document
Ctrl+Home Moves the cursor to the beginning of the document
Shortcut keys in SmartEdit Writer
F1 Opens the GetHelp page on the SmartEdit Writer website

Navigation
F6 Opens the Document tree
F7 Opens the Fragments tree
F8 Opens the Research tree
Ctrl+Tab Move to the next word processor tab
Ctrl+Shift+Tab Move to the previous word processor tab

Adding new items

Ctrl+Shift+S Add a new scene
Ctrl+Shift+N Add a new note
Ctrl+Shift+D Add a new folder

Ctrl+Shift+M Add a new image [Research tree only]

Ctrl+Shift+B Add a new bookmark [Research tree only]
Ctrl+Shift+L Add a new file [Research tree only]

Searching
Ctrl+F When the word processor is active, opens the Find and Replace dialog
Ctrl+F When a tree is active, opens the Find in tree box at the top of the tree
Ctrl+Shift+F Opens the global search, so you can search in every scene and note

Tree — Document, Fragments and Research

F2 Renames the current tree item
Del Deletes the current tree item

Word Processor
Ctrl+G Moves the focus from the word processor to the current scene or note in the tree
Ctrl+W Closes the currently active scene
Ctrl+P Prints the active scene or note

Ctrl+A Select all text in scene or note

Ctrl+B Makes selected text bold
Ctrl+I Makes selected text italic
Ctrl+U Makes selected text underlined
Ctrl+Z Undo last change
Ctrl+Y Redo last change

Ctrl+X Cuts the selected text

Ctrl+C Copies the selected text
Ctrl+V Pastes the copied text
Word Processor cont'd
Ctrl+Shift+V Pastes the copied text as plain text (no formatting)
Ctrl+J Justifies the selected text
Ctrl+L Aligns the selected text to the left
Ctrl+R Aligns the selected text to the right
Shift+F3 Toggles the selected text between lower case, upper case and title case

Ctrl+F Opens the Find and Replace dialog

Ctrl+D Opens the font dialog

Ctrl+[ Increase the font size of selected text

Ctrl+] Decrease the font size of selected text

Ctrl+ Up Arrow Moves to beginning of paragraph

Ctrl+ Down Arrow Moves to end of paragraph

Ctrl+Del Deletes the word to the right of the cursor

Ctrl+Backspace Deletes the word to the left of the cursor
Ctrl+End Moves the cursor to the end of the document
Ctrl+Home Moves the cursor to the beginning of the document