DragonWriter

Covers and images

Every story has a cover, and you can drop images inside your scenes and codex entries. This page explains both.

Choosing a cover colour and pattern

A cover is built from a background colour and an optional pattern. From a story's edit screen you can set the cover colour, or leave it automatic — an automatic cover is given a colour from a curated palette of deep, saturated tones, chosen consistently so the same story always gets the same colour. A Random button picks a fresh palette colour for you.

On top of the colour you can choose a pattern from a gallery of live-tinted swatches — scroll it with the arrows. It starts with None (a solid colour) and the built-in patterns (Circles, Gradient, Grid, Leather, Linen, Scales, Stripes), followed by any extra patterns your site's administrators have added. Every swatch previews in your chosen cover colour, and the big preview and the swatches all update live as you change the colour or pattern.

Uploading a cover image

Instead of (or as well as) a colour and pattern, you can upload your own cover image from the story edit screen. Images up to 10 MB are accepted in the usual formats (PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, AVIF). Uploading a new cover image replaces the previous one, and a Remove option takes you back to the colour-and-pattern cover.

Cover images count toward your image-storage limit. Because a new cover replaces the old, only the change in size is charged against your quota, and your existing work is never blocked.

A cover from Unsplash

If your site has Unsplash enabled, the cover editor has a Cover from Unsplash search box. Type what you're after, pick a photo, and it becomes your cover — cropped to the 2:3 cover shape, published with your story, and embedded in your exports, exactly like an uploaded cover. The photographer is credited automatically (a small "Photo by … on Unsplash" line under the cover, and a line in your EPUB/Word exports), as Unsplash's terms require, so you don't add attribution yourself for these.

Crediting an uploaded cover

For a cover image you uploaded yourself, you can add a short attribution line from the cover editor — for example to credit an artist. It accepts basic Markdown, so you can include a link and emphasis: Art by [Jane Doe](https://example.com) — used with permission. The credit shows under the cover wherever the story appears (its page, the library, your profile) and is baked into your exports. You can edit or clear it at any time; only http/https links are allowed. (Uploading a new cover image clears the old attribution, since it's a new picture.)

How covers are rasterised

Wherever your cover appears as a picture — in your library, and inside exported manuscripts — DragonWriter needs a flat image rather than a live colour-plus-pattern drawing. So the cover is rasterised: your browser draws the colour, pattern, and any uploaded image together and saves the result as a single PNG. This happens quietly in the background when you create or update a cover. Stories made before this step existed, or imported without a usable image, generate their rasterised cover the next time you open them.

Inline images in scenes and codex entries

You can place images directly inside a scene or a codex entry. Uploaded images (up to 10 MB each, in the same formats as covers) are stored against the story and inserted where your cursor is. They too count toward your image-storage limit.

Unused images are swept away

When you remove an image from a scene or note, the file it pointed to is no longer needed. DragonWriter tidies these up automatically: when you next open the story's structure, any uploaded image that is no longer referenced anywhere in the story is deleted, freeing the storage. This sweep is careful to keep images that are still in use, including ones kept alive only by a published copy of the story or by an item waiting in the recycle bin, so nothing you still need is lost.

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