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Exporting & printing

Your writing lives in .poiesis files, but the world wants Word documents, PDFs, ebooks, and Markdown. φ exports to all of them — a single document for sharing a draft, or a whole collection compiled into one finished book.

Nothing leaves your Mac in the process: every export is rendered locally and written to a file you choose with a normal Save dialog.

Export is the roughest part of φ right now

φ is alpha software, and export — EPUB, PDF, Word (DOCX), and compiled HTML — is the area still under the most active work. It's the part of the app most likely to disappoint today, so go in with the right expectations:

  • Treat every export as a draft, not a final file. Open the result in the target app (Word, a PDF viewer, an EPUB reader) and proofread it before you rely on it. Expect to do some cleanup there.
  • Complex layouts are where it strains — heavy footnotes, citations and bibliographies, nested chapter structure, images and full-bleed covers, and unusual blocks may render imperfectly or need manual fixing.
  • Your source is always safe. Export never changes your .poiesis files, so you can re-export as often as you like — and exporters are improving with each release, so a document that exports poorly today should export better soon.
  • For the most faithful results today, Markdown and HTML are the most stable; DOCX, EPUB, and PDF are improving but the least mature.

If an export comes out wrong, that's known territory — your feedback on which documents break and how is the most useful thing you can send during alpha.

Exporting a single document​

With a document open, open the command palette (⌘P) and choose Export document as… for the format you want. φ renders it and asks where to save.

The document formats are:

  • Markdown / Obsidian (.md) — Obsidian-flavored Markdown: callouts, ==highlight==, [[wiki-links]], footnotes. Best for moving text into another Markdown app or a static site, or for plain-text archiving.
  • HTML (.html) — semantic, self-contained HTML. Best for the web or for pasting into another tool with formatting intact.
  • Plain text (.txt) — just the words, no formatting. Best when a tool wants raw text.

These export the one active document. To compile several documents into a single book, use a collection (below).

Exporting a collection (a book or manuscript)​

A collection compiles its documents — in tree order, parts and chapters included — into one finished work. Open the collection's page in the Write space and use the buttons at the bottom:

  • Compile — one self-contained HTML document, framed with a title page, table of contents, and the collection's export style. Good for previewing the whole book in a browser.
  • PDF — a print-ready PDF (see below).
  • EPUB — an EPUB3 ebook: your editor styling and chosen font embedded, images included, a tree-aware navigation table of contents, and the cover.
  • DOCX — a Word document with headings, marks, lists, callouts, and scene breaks preserved. Best for editors, submissions, and anyone who works in Word.

Every collection export embeds the cover image, builds a table of contents from the book's structure, and can close with an About the author page when the author profile has a bio or photo. The byline and author details come from the collection's author profile.

Printing & PDF​

φ doesn't print through the system print dialog; instead it produces a print-ready PDF you can print or send. The PDF is built to book conventions:

  • Fixed paper size — US Letter, with book margins, a running title at the top, and page numbers at the foot.
  • WYSIWYG body — each page renders in your chosen editor font and text measure, so the PDF wraps lines the way the editor does.
  • A page per chapter — chapters (and parts) start on a new page, with centered openers.
  • True per-page footnotes — each footnote is pinned to the bottom of the page its marker sits on. See Footnotes & citations.
  • Bibliography on its own page — the reference list opens a fresh page at the end, with no stray blanks before it.
  • Full-bleed cover — the cover image fills its page, edge to edge, with no running header or footer.

Importing​

φ reads work from other tools and from your own backups.

  • Import a φ document (.poiesis) — from the File menu, or Import a φ document in the command palette (⌘P). This brings in a portable .poiesis file (with its embedded images) — for example, a copy you saved with Save a Copy.
  • Import Markdown file(s) — choose Import Markdown file(s) in the command palette. φ reads Markdown / Obsidian / Logseq files, including frontmatter, headings, lists and tasks, callouts, highlights, and wiki-links.
  • Import an Obsidian / Logseq vault — choose Import Obsidian / Logseq vault in the command palette to bring an entire vault folder in recursively, keeping its nested folder structure. You can import it into your current vault or as a new vault.

See also​