Statuses explained
Mark any passage Raw, Draft, Cleaned or Published, and see how finished your book is at a glance.
Every stretch of your prose can carry a status, shown as a coloured highlight. They tell you at a glance how finished each part is.
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Raw | Pure brain dump |
| Draft | Better than raw, not final |
| Cleaned | Mostly good, ready-ish |
| Published | Has been released |
Setting a status
- Select some text in a chapter.
- A small menu appears next to the selection. Choose Set Raw, Set Draft, Set Cleaned or Set Published (the letters R, D, C and P).
The highlight changes at once. You can mark a single sentence or several paragraphs.
Text you have not marked
Unmarked text takes the chapter's own status. A new chapter with no marks has no markup in its file at all. Setting a passage back to the chapter's status clears its mark.
The counts
Above the page, a legend shows the number of words in each status. Choose one to jump to the next passage with that status. The chapter list shows each chapter's mix, and a book's page shows how much of the book is at each stage.
Hiding the highlights
The Marks button hides or shows the highlights. Your choice is remembered on this device. Hiding does not change the file.
Ready check
The Ready check button checks whether a chapter is ready to go out. It publishes nothing. It reports on:
- the chapter has a title;
- no Raw text is left;
- all text is Cleaned or Published (a chapter-level status alone does not count);
- no undecided alternates;
- the chapter meets a minimum length (500 words).
In the file
Statuses are stored as HTML comments in the Markdown, so the chapter still reads as ordinary prose in GitHub or any other editor. Do not delete the comments by hand unless you mean to remove the marks.
Undo
Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z on a Mac) undoes a status change, as it does typing.