Prepare your chapter files

Colophon reads a folder of plain text files and never changes them. You don't write in Colophon — you keep writing in your usual app, and Colophon reads what you save.

The files Colophon reads

• Files ending in .md, .txt or .markdown.
• One file per chapter is the usual arrangement. One file for the whole book works too.
• Other files in the folder are left out, and the Manuscript screen tells you how many.

If you write in Word, Pages, Scrivener or Google Docs, export or copy each chapter to a plain text file first, and keep those files together in one folder.

Mark your chapters and scenes

By default, Colophon needs two things from your files: a line starting with # begins a chapter, and a line starting with ## begins a scene.

# Chapter 1: The Light

## The Watch

My father climbed the tower at four.

## The Boat

A boat came in on the Tuesday.

That's all Colophon needs. Everything else in the file is your prose.

If your files are laid out differently — exported from iA Writer or Scrivener, split into scenes by a line of ***, or following a pattern of your own — choose a different format. See Choose how Colophon reads your files.

To see how Colophon reads your own first chapter, choose Help ▸ How Colophon Reads Your Files.

Formatting Colophon shows

When Colophon shows your prose, it honours these marks:

• **bold** for bold
• *italic* or _italic_ for italic
• backticks around a word for code
• ~~cut this~~ for struck-through text
• > quoted at the start of a paragraph for a block quote
• a \ at the end of a line for a line break

A # line appears as a heading. A line containing only ***, ---, ___, ### or ——— appears as a break across the page. Anything else — a table, a footnote, a note your editor left behind — appears exactly as you typed it.

Prose outside a scene

Text that comes before a chapter's first scene — a dedication, an epigraph, front matter — is read and shown, but it isn't compared paragraph by paragraph. If it changes, Check for changes marks the chapter changed and says the change is outside every scene. Colophon also tells you when a chapter has words outside every scene.

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