Editor rule sets

A rule set is a small bundle of auto-corrections the editor applies as you type — turning straight quotes into curly ones, dashes into en and em dashes, three dots into an ellipsis, and your own words into whatever you prefer (for example Tane into Tāne). You build rule sets in your settings and then apply one to a story, so it works across that story's scenes, notes, characters and locations. Because a rule set belongs to the story rather than to you, everyone collaborating on that story gets the same corrections. Rule sets only ever affect new typing, never text you have already written — see convert existing quotes below for tidying up older punctuation.

Building a rule set

Your rule sets live under Settings → Editor rule sets. Select New rule set, give it a name, choose the behaviours you want, and save it. You can create several — one for a te-reo-heavy story, another for a series with recurring invented names — and edit or delete them at any time. A rule set you delete is quietly removed from any story using it, which simply falls back to no corrections.

To build on an existing set rather than start over, use the duplicate button (between edit and delete) on any rule set. It makes a new, unlinked copy named Copy of … and opens it for editing straight away; changing the copy never touches the original.

Punctuation

A handful of ready-made toggles cover the common typographic tidy-ups. All of them are off by default, so a brand-new rule set changes nothing until you turn something on:

Curly double quotes — turns a straight " into an opening or closing curly quote, chosen from the surrounding text.
Curly single quotes — the same for ', which also curls apostrophes (so don't becomes don’t).
En dash — turns -- into an en dash (–).
Em dash — turns --- (or an en dash followed by a hyphen) into an em dash (—).
Ellipsis — turns ... into a single ellipsis character (…).
Arrows — turns -> into → and <- into ←.

Curly double and single quotes are separate on purpose. The single-quote toggle also governs apostrophes, and the open-or-close guess is occasionally wrong — an elision like ’90s or a measurement like 6'2" — so you might want tidy curly speech marks while leaving apostrophes straight. Turn on only what suits the story.

Custom replacements

Below the toggles you can add as many input → output replacements as you like. Type the trigger text on the left and what it should become on the right — for example Tane → Tāne, or Mueller → Müller. Each replacement has two options:

Case sensitive — when on, the trigger must match capitalisation exactly, so Tane is corrected but tane is left alone.
Whole word only — when on, the replacement waits until you finish the word with a space or punctuation, and never fires inside a longer word, so a rule for cat leaves category untouched. With it off, the replacement happens the moment you finish typing the trigger, which suits fixing a spelling like Mueller wherever it appears.

Applying a rule set to a story

Open the story's Edit metadata page and choose a set from the Editor rule set menu (or None to switch it off). Only the story owner can set or change this, and the menu lists the owner's own rule sets. Once applied, the corrections take effect the next time anyone opens a scene, note, character or location in that story.

Because rule sets only change new typing, applying one does not touch a single word already on the page. If you turn on curly quotes partway through a draft, everything you type from then on is curly, and you can fix the earlier straight quotes with the buttons below. If an auto-correction ever fires when you did not want it, pressing Backspace straight after it reverts to exactly what you typed.

Converting existing quotes

Two buttons at the right-hand end of the editor toolbar convert the quotes already in a document, in one step:

The double-quote button (" ") converts straight double quotes to curly, or curly back to straight.
The single-quote button (' ') does the same for single quotes and apostrophes.