iA Writer for Android: Quick Start

Welcome to iA Writer for Android.

What's New?

Search for files and inside the editor
Many user experience refinements
Small bug fixes and performance improvements

Using Writer

In an Open Document

Hide the soft keyboard, touch the text or hit "Esc" on your hardware keyboard to access the menu.
Go to the document list by swiping right.
Go to the preview by swiping left.

In the Document List

Click on a document to open it in the editor.
Long click a file or folder to access context menu options like moving, renaming, deleting.
Go to the editor by swiping left.
Navigate up by swiping right.

In the Storage System Menu

Long press on a storage system menu entry to disconnect/reconnect the storage system in question.

In the Preview

Change the template.
Hit "Export" to export the document as Text, HTML, PDF or MS Word document.
Swipe right to return to the editor.

Questions? Problems?

Visit http://ia.net/writer/android for more information
Visit http://ia.net/writer/support/android for help

We look forward to hearing from you!
— Information Architects

Markdown Guide

Basics

If you are not familiar with Markdown, it might look a little scary at first. Once you get the basics, you will quickly love it as it allows you to format your text without taking your hands off the keyboard. iA Writer’s Auto-Markdown will give you instant feedback if you got the formatting right or not.

Headings

You can use up to up to six levels by writing # before a heading; the number of hashtags defines the hierarchy of the heading. Don’t forget to add a space after the #:

First Level Heading

Second Level Heading

Third Level Heading

Emphasis and Importance

Emphasis (“italics”) and important (“bold”) are written by putting * or _ around the text you want to see in a different format.

Emphasis: example or _example_
Importance: example or __example__
Emphasis + Importance example or ___example___

Numbered Lists

Type 1. then a space. Any number (followed by a full stop and space) can be used.

Ordered list item
Ordered list item
Ordered list item

Bulleted Lists

Type , - or + then a space. Create a bulleted list by using an asterisk (), hyphen (-), or plus sign (+), followed by a space.

Bulleted list item
Bulleted list item
Bulleted list item

Nesting Lists

You can also nest lists several levels deep.

Unordered:

First level
- Second level

Ordered:

First level
1. Second level

Blockquotes

Type > plus a space (just like email):

A quoted paragraph

A quoted paragraph inside a quotation

Advanced

Links

Create a link by surrounding the link text in square brackets, followed immediately by the URL in parentheses:

text to link

You can also use reference links. Add the reference in square brackets after the text to link. Then, on a line by itself add the reference with a colon, space, and the URL:

text to link
…

Code

You can mark up code in-line using backticks (code), or add a code block by adding at least four spaces to the start of a line:

This is a code block

Footnotes

Add a footnote in square brackets preceded by a caret. Then add the footnote content like a reference link, for example:

Some text with a footnote¹.
…

You can also add an inline footnote in the following manner

Some text with a footnote[^This is the footnote itself.].

Horizontal Rules

You can add a thematic break which will be represented by a dividing line (<hr>) when exported to HTML. To do so, add three or more asterisks (*), hyphens (-), or underscores (_) on a line by themselves, optionally separated with spaces. For example:

Content Blocks

You can now include include entire texts, tables, or program code sequences by simply starting a new line with a slash /, followed by the name of the file that you want to include. E.g.

/chapter1.txt

or:

/somecode.py

or even:

/sometable.csv

Learn more about content blocks here. Please note that Writer for Android does not support the inclusion of local images (images from the web can be included).

Under "Settings", there is a new option that allows you to turn on file extensions in the file list. Like that, you'll not have to guess the extension of a file that you want to add as a content block.

Commonmark

Preview and Export support Commonmark 0.27. See this website for more information.

Keyboard Shortcuts

A list of hardware keyboard shortcuts:

Cursor Position

Use the arrow keys to move through the document
Fn + ← go to start of line
Fn + → go to end of line
Ctrl + ← go to previous word
Ctrl + → go to next word
Ctrl + ↑ go to previous paragraph
Ctrl + ↓ go to next paragraph

Use shift plus any of the above keys to select text.

Text Manipulation

Ctrl + C copy
Ctrl + X cut
Ctrl + V paste
Ctrl + A select all
Ctrl + Z undo
Ctrl + Shift + Z redo
Ctrl + B bold
Ctrl + I italic
Ctrl + - strikethrough
Ctrl + 1...6 h1 ... h6
Tab insert four spaces
Shift + Enter line break

UI Control

Esc bring up menu
Use tab or the arrow keys to navigate the menu on a hardware keyboard

Fine-Print

We would like to thank Andrei Gramakov for providing a Russian interface translation.

Icons created by Raphaël Buquet and Shmidt Sergey from the Noun Project.

iA Writer relies on the ICU library to identify character encodings: http://site.icu-project.org/

We use the standard tools provided by Google and, if you connect it, by Dropbox: Google Analytics, Play Store analytics, Dropbox developer account analytics. None of these methods allow us to access the documents you store in iA Writer.

The information required to connect to Google Drive resides in your device's contacts information. For that reason, we have to ask you for permission to access your contacts. This will happen on install on pre-Marshmallow devices. On Marshmallow and later, it will only happen when you connect Google Drive. We will not use this information for anything else than to connect to Google Drive.

The linked footnote appears at the end of the document. ↩

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iA Writer for Android Quick Start