Applies to ScribeWright 1.1.117
Book Setup & Styles
Two dialogs shape the book: Book Setup holds what the book is (metadata, cover, fonts, sources); the Style Editor holds how it looks.
Book Setup (Ctrl+Shift+B)
View ▸ Book Setup…, six tabs. Everything you change applies to the book as you type; Done closes the dialog.
- General: title and subtitle; language (drives spelling and the
language the EPUB declares); publisher; the publication date (tick
the box and pick a day, or leave it unticked to publish without one); rights, one line such as Copyright © 2026 Ada Example. All rights
reserved.; a description and subjects (comma-separated, e.g. Science fiction, Space opera; stores read these). Kind of work and Formatting profile sit together because they
are one decision for most books: ticking non-fiction changes the
wording of the generated copyright page and, as long as the profile is
still the default
fiction, switches it tononfiction(unticking switches it back the same way). A profile you picked yourself is never changed for you. The profile is what Layout Review (F9) checks the book against. See Formatting Rules. The identifier is what stores and reading apps use to tell one book from another: a UUID by default (read-only; Regenerate makes a new one after asking, because a new identifier makes this look like a different book), or your ISBN (10 or 13 digits, hyphens and spaces welcome, checked as you type). - Authors: one or more contributors, each with a role in plain words: Author, Editor, Illustrator, Translator, Contributor, Publisher, Designer, Photographer, Foreword by, Afterword by. (A role that arrived in an imported EPUB and isn’t on that list shows as its code and is kept as it is.) Sort name is how stores shelve the book; left blank it’s made from the name ("J.R.R. Tolkien" → "Tolkien, J.R.R.").
- Cover: set or remove the cover image.
- Fonts: embed font files in the book, with optional W3C obfuscation for foundries whose license requires it.
- Non-fiction holds the choices a non-fiction book’s structure runs on: how deep the Contents goes (chapters only, or h2 and h3 headings under them) and whether parts are listed; whether figures and tables number per chapter (Figure 2.1) or through the book (Figure 7); where footnotes go (the end of each chapter, a Notes chapter at the end of the book, or pop-up readers only); how a cross-reference to a heading reads and whether the PDF adds on page 57; whether long code lines wrap in the EPUB; and whether list items are paragraphs. Under Index and Citations: the Citation Style (Chicago author-date or Numbered), what the Bibliography Lists (the cited sources, or all of them), and how the EPUB’s Index Links read (chapter numbers, or one numbered link per marker; the PDF prints page numbers either way). Numbers, notes and reference text are added when you export; the editor shows a preview, so a change here shows the next time a chapter opens.
- Sources: the works the book cites (below).
Anything that would trip up the EPUB (a missing title, an ISBN whose digits don’t add up, or a contributor without a name) gets a small error icon beside the field; point at it for the reason. Done never locks: if something is still wrong when you close, one summary lists it all, and you can Continue (the book keeps what you entered) or Go back to the first problem.
Sources
Book Setup ▸ Sources lists the works the book cites, one row per source with its key, type, authors, title, and year, in Bibliography order. Citations in the text name a source by its key; see Citations and Bibliography.
- + Add opens the source editor for a new source; Edit… (or a double-click, or Enter) opens the selected one.
- Delete removes the selected source after asking. When the text cites it, the question says how many citations will show as missing; Layout Review lists them until each one names another source or is removed.
- Import… reads a BibTeX (
.bib) or CSL-JSON (.json) file, the formats Zotero, Mendeley, and most reference managers export. When keys in the file are already in the book, one question settles them all: Keep skips the imported sources, Replace puts them in place of the book’s, and Import as New Key adds them under a free key such as rhue2026-2. A summary then says what was added, replaced, or skipped, with a note on anything that did not map exactly (an entry type imported as the closest one, an entry given a key). - Export… writes every source to a CSL-JSON file that reference managers read.
The source editor asks for a Key (your short name for the source, without spaces, and used by no other source), the Type, the Authors (people by family and given names, one row each, or an organization), and the Title, then shows only the fields the type uses:
| Type | Fields |
|---|---|
| Book | Publisher, Place, Edition, Year, URL, DOI |
| Article | Journal, Volume, Issue, Pages, Year, URL, DOI |
| Web Page | Site, Year, URL, Accessed |
| Document | Publisher, Report Number, Year, URL, DOI |
| Standard | Publisher, Number, Year, URL |
Switching the type hides fields without clearing them. Reads As shows the Bibliography entry as export will print it. Changing the key of a source the text cites asks first, because those citations keep the old key.
Style Editor
View ▸ Style Editor…, four tabs:
- Typography: the book-wide voice. Start from a Preset ▾: Classic novel (serif, justified, 1.5 em indent, no space between paragraphs, an ornamental scene break), Modern novel (serif, left aligned, 1.2 em indent, a short rule for scene breaks), Non-fiction (sans-serif headings, no indent, 0.8 em between paragraphs) or Large print (text at 130 %, line spacing 1.6). A preset is a starting point, not a lock: every field below stays editable, and the list reads Custom as soon as the values match no preset. Presets touch only these settings; custom classes and custom CSS stay as they are. The fields themselves speak plain English: Text size (%), Line spacing (Single / 1.15 / 1.5 / Double, or Custom for a number), justified vs left alignment, Paragraphs (First-line indent, the fiction convention, or Block, meaning space between paragraphs and no indent, the non-fiction convention; Block greys out the indent settings it ignores), First-line indent (em; 1.5 em is about three characters), Space between paragraphs (em), whether the first paragraph after a heading (and after a scene break) indents, the heading font and Heading size, block-quote style, and the scene-break glyph. The preview shows the chapter you were editing (or sample text) in the reader theme your preview panes use.
- Custom Classes: named styles for special passages (letters, telegrams, inscriptions): font, size, weight, alignment, color, margins, indent, float. Apply them from the Home tab’s class dropdown (see Writing & Formatting).
- Blocks: the code font for code blocks and inline code (a family bundled in Book Setup ▸ Fonts, or a name most readers have) and its size as a percentage of the text, whether captions read in italics or plain, the table style (Lines, Grid or Plain) and the callout style (tinted, or the coloured rule alone). The preview’s sample text has a list, a code block, a caption, a table and a callout to show them.
Changes preview immediately in the editor, and both dialogs only mark the book as modified if you actually changed something.
One Principle
Format the book, not the paragraph. If you’re reaching for a one-off tweak, the honest fixes are: it belongs in Typography (every chapter should look this way), or it deserves a Custom Class (this kind of passage should look this way).