Skrift

A calm, distraction-free home for your novel — from first idea to finished manuscript.

This manual walks through everything Skrift can do. Use the contents list on the left to jump to any topic.

1Welcome to Skrift

Skrift is a writing studio for long-form fiction. Instead of one enormous document, your book lives as a tidy tree of chapters, notes, character sheets and research — all inside a single project file you can carry between computers. A full formatting toolbar, spelling and grammar checking, find & replace, coloured margin notes and optional AI assistance are all built in.

Everything you write is saved automatically, and a project can sync between your Mac and other machines through a cloud folder such as OneDrive, iCloud, Dropbox or Google Drive — no accounts or servers required.

2Getting Started

When you open Skrift you land on the welcome screen. From here you can:

• New Project — create a fresh book with a ready-made folder structure.
• Open Project — browse for an existing .skrift file.
• Import Scrivener… — bring in an existing Scrivener project (see Importing).

Recently opened projects appear beneath these buttons — up to ten of them — so you can jump straight back in with a click.

New to Skrift? A few example projects — classic public-domain short stories, complete with chapters, characters and notes — are offered under Try an example so you can explore every feature on real content before starting your own book.

Cloud and Local tabs

The left sidebar lists your projects under two tabs:

• ☁ Cloud Projects found in your cloud-synced folders, so they follow you between devices.
• 🖥 Local Projects in a folder of your choosing on this computer.

A search box filters both lists by name, you can drag project entries to reorder them, and right-clicking a project offers Delete project… (which moves the file to your system Trash).

3Projects & the Binder

The binder is the sidebar on the left that holds your project's structure. A new project comes with these folders:

Manuscript Cover Characters Places Ideas Illustrations Notes Research Templates Trash

Your chapters live in Manuscript; everything else is there to keep your ideas, characters, settings and reference material organised. The Notes folder starts with a Chapter Breakdown document — a place to outline your chapters (and, if you use AI, a document it can read for context).

Working with items

• Add a document with the ＋ button at the top of the binder, or right-click a folder for more options.
• Reorder and reorganise by dragging items and folders around the tree.
• Rename, duplicate, create from a template and more via right-click.
• Tag a document with the people, viewpoint and setting it contains: right-click it and choose 🏷 Tags…. The 🏷 button at the top of the binder filters the binder by tag. See Tags & Collections.
• Delete sends an item to Trash (a soft delete you can recover from) until you empty it.

To add a picture or file — a cover image in Cover, artwork in Illustrations, a reference PDF in Research — either drag it from Finder onto the folder, or right-click the folder and choose Add Image… / Add File…. Images and PDFs can be previewed inside the app. Close a project any time with the ✕ next to the project title, or from the File menu.

4Writing & Formatting

Select a document in the binder and it opens in the writing area. Along the top is the formatting toolbar.

The toolbar

Page colours

Prefer writing on cream paper or a stark white page? The page-colour menu offers Default (dark), Parchment, Cream, Sepia, White, Soft grey, Mint and Night black. The choice is saved per document.

Scene breaks

Use the scene-break button ⸻, its optional hotkey, or right-click in the text and choose ⁂ Insert chapter break to drop a centred ornament (⁂) between scenes. From the right-click menu it goes where you clicked (or just after any selected text). It's a proper typographic break, not just text, so on export it becomes a clean divider — and in the Book (typeset) style, an ornamental one.

Tables

Click the table ▦ button and drag out the size you want on the little grid — say 3 × 4 — to insert a table with a heading row along the top. Click any cell to type, and press Tab to move to the next cell (⇧ Tab to go back). Right-click inside a table for the full set of options: insert or delete rows and columns, toggle the heading row, or delete the whole table. Drag a column's right-hand edge to resize it.

Tables are most at home in your research and planning documents — a timeline, a beat sheet, a character stat block, a magic-system reference — where you might keep one open beside your chapter in Split View. They're carried through to every export format: real tables in Word, PDF, EPUB and HTML, pipe tables in Markdown, and a simple aligned layout in plain text.

Footnotes

To add a footnote, put the cursor where the marker should go and click fn on the toolbar (or right-click and choose Insert footnote…). Type the note and save — a small numbered marker appears in the text, and the note itself is listed in a Footnotes panel beneath the page. Click a marker (or a row in the panel) to edit it; right-click a marker to edit or delete it.

Footnotes number themselves automatically, and the numbering restarts at 1 in each document — since every Manuscript document becomes a chapter on export, each chapter's notes count from one. Add, remove or reorder them and the numbers keep themselves in order.

When you export, the Export window lets you choose how footnotes appear. Footnotes (bottom of page) places them at the foot of the page as true Word footnotes; Endnotes (end of chapter) gathers them into a short Notes list after each chapter. Bottom-of-page footnotes apply to the Word (.docx) export — PDF, EPUB, HTML, Markdown and plain text always collect the notes at the end of each chapter, with their reference numbers linked. Either way the numbering restarts at 1 in every chapter, and — unlike notes — footnotes are part of your finished text and always export.

Zoom

Hold ⌘ and scroll to zoom the page in or out, or use View ▸ Zoom In / Out / Reset (⌘ +, ⌘ -, ⌘ 0). Zoom is remembered per document, and the current level shows in the status bar — click it to reset.

Smart typography

As you type, Skrift automatically curls your quotation marks (" → “ ”), turns a double hyphen into an em dash (-- → —), and converts three dots into an ellipsis (... → …) — the little touches a polished manuscript expects.

The status bar

Along the bottom of the window you'll find your save status, live word count, zoom level, cloud-sync status, AI spend (when AI is on), and the app version.

5Saving & Backups

• Autosave — your work is saved continuously as you write, and always flushed when you switch documents.
• Save (⌘ S) and Save As… (⌘ ⇧ S) are available from the File menu.
• Save to Cloud… moves a project into your cloud folder so it syncs across devices.
• Back up all Skrift files… copies your projects to a location you choose; you can set a default backup folder in Settings.

A whole project — its structure, text and embedded images — is stored in one .skrift file, written safely so a crash mid-save can't corrupt it.

Snapshots (version history)

Before a big rewrite, take a snapshot — a saved copy of a document's current version you can return to. Right-click a document in the binder and choose 📷 Take Snapshot (or use View ▸ Take Snapshot, ⌘ ⇧ D).

Open Snapshots… (from the same menus) to see every saved version of a document, listed by date with its word count. From there you can:

• Compare with current — see what's changed since the snapshot, with additions and deletions highlighted;
• Restore — roll the document back to that version (a snapshot of the current version is taken first, so a restore is always reversible);
• Rename or Delete snapshots.

Snapshots are stored inside your project, so they travel with the .skrift file.

Automatic backups

Skrift also keeps rolling, timestamped backups of your project automatically (roughly every ten minutes as you work), storing the most recent fifteen. You never need to think about it, but if you ever need to recover an earlier version, choose File ▸ Show Backups Folder and open the backup you want. You can turn auto-backups off in Settings.

Bookmarks

In a long document, drop a bookmark at the cursor with View ▸ Add Bookmark (⌘ ⇧ B), then jump back to it any time from View ▸ Bookmarks…. Bookmarks anchor to the text of the line, so they still find their place after you edit around them.

6Cloud Sync

Skrift has no servers of its own. Instead, if your project lives in a cloud-synced folder (OneDrive, iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive…), that provider moves the file between your machines and Skrift stays aware of the changes.

• The status bar shows the provider and state: Synced, Saving…, Updated or Merged.
• If another computer saves changes while you're working, Skrift pulls them in and intelligently merges — edits to different documents on different machines both survive, and the newer version wins when the same document is edited in two places.
• If a genuine conflict occurs, a backup copy is kept safe so nothing is ever lost.

New projects can be created directly in your cloud folder, and the File menu's Save to Cloud… moves an existing one there.

7Notes

Notes are small coloured annotations you can drop anywhere in your writing — reminders, questions to yourself, "check this fact later", and so on.

• Add a note: right-click in the text and choose 📝 Add note…, or use the optional insert-note hotkey. Type the text and pick a colour.
• Edit or delete: right-click an existing note and choose Edit note… or Delete note.
• Notes can't be typed over during normal writing, so they stay intact as you work around them.
• They're excluded from your word count and statistics — they're author's marks, not prose.

8Find & Replace

Open Find with ⌘ F and Find & Replace with ⌘ R. A bar appears at the top of the writing area.

• Type to search — every match is highlighted and the current one scrolls into view. A counter shows "3 of 12".
• Enter jumps to the next match, ⇧ Enter to the previous (or use the ▲ / ▼ buttons).
• Aa toggles match-case; W toggles whole-word matching.
• In replace mode, Replace swaps the current match and moves on; All replaces every match at once and tells you how many.
• If you have text selected when you open the bar, it's used as the starting search term. Press Esc to close.

Replacements are ordinary edits — you can undo them with ⌘ Z.

Find in Project

To search every document at once — "where did I mention this character across all my chapters?" — use Edit ▸ Find in Project… (⌘ ⇧ F). Results are grouped by document with a snippet of surrounding text; click any result to open that document and jump straight to the match. Match-case and whole-word toggles apply here too. (Trash and Templates are not searched.)

9Spelling & Grammar

Open the spelling bar from View ▸ Spelling & Grammar (or its optional hotkey). From there you can:

• Check spelling on demand, or have Skrift check while you type (red wavy underlines).
• Turn on light grammar checks (repeated words, a lone lowercase "i", spaces before punctuation).
• Switch between British and American dictionaries.

Right-click a flagged word for suggestions, or to Add to Dictionary or Ignore it.

Dictionary & thesaurus

Right-click any word and choose Look up "…" to see its definition and a list of synonyms. Click a synonym to swap it straight into your text. (This uses an online lookup, so it needs a connection.)

Style analysis

Open View ▸ Style Analysis for a revision aid that reads your prose and highlights things worth a second look. Click Analyse now and Skrift marks, in the text:

• Adverbs, filter words (felt, saw, noticed…), weak / hedge words (very, really, just…) and said-bookisms (dialogue tags other than "said") — underlined in their own colours;
• Passive voice, clichés and nearby repeats (echoes) — shown as coloured tints.

Tick the categories on the bar to show or hide each kind of mark. Report… opens a summary with a readability score and grade level, your sentence-length spread, the words you lean on most, and your longest sentences (click one to jump to it). Everything here runs on your own computer — no internet, no cost — and follows your British / American setting.

If AI is switched on, an ✦ AI line edit button appears too: it asks Claude for a short, specific list of editorial notes on the current passage (weak verbs, telling not showing, overwritten lines) — the one part of this feature that uses AI, so it's hidden when AI is off.

Read aloud

Hearing your words is one of the best ways to proofread — your ear catches the missing word, the clumsy rhythm and the accidental repeat that your eye glides straight past. Choose View ▸ Read Aloud (⌥ ⌘ R — hold Option and Command, then press R) and Skrift reads the current document to you, highlighting each sentence as it goes.

• With text selected, just that passage is read. Otherwise reading starts at the sentence your cursor is in and carries on to the end. You can also right-click in the text and choose 🔊 Read aloud from here.
• Press ⌥ ⌘ R again (or the button on the bar) to pause and resume. ■ stops, ⏮ / ⏭ step back or forward a sentence, and Esc (or ✕) stops reading and closes the bar.
• Choose a voice and speed on the bar — both are remembered. Notes and footnote markers are skipped.
• You can keep editing while it reads; it carries on from wherever it had got to.

10Statistics & Writing Goals

View ▸ Document Statistics (or its optional hotkey) shows a quick breakdown of the current document: words, characters with and without spaces, paragraphs, and an approximate page count. The hotkey toggles the window open and closed.

Writing goals

Set targets to keep yourself motivated with View ▸ Writing Goals… (or click the 🎯 indicator in the status bar). You can set three kinds of goal, each with a live progress bar:

• Project goal — a total word target for the whole manuscript (e.g. 80,000 for a novel).
• Daily goal — words to write today; it resets automatically each day.
• Session goal — words written since you opened the project, with a Reset session button to start a fresh count any time.

Progress is measured across your Manuscript folder, and the daily and session goals count the net words you add. Once a goal is set, the status bar shows a running 🎯 total that turns green with a ✓ when you hit it.

The Writing Goals window also tracks your writing streak — how many days in a row you've written — along with your best-ever streak and a 14-day bar chart of your recent output, to help keep the habit going.

11Views: Split, Focus, Outline & Quick Open

• Split View (⌘ \) shows two documents side by side — perfect for referring to your outline while you write the chapter.
• Pop Out Document (⌘ ⇧ O) opens the current document in its own floating window as a read-only reference.

You can also resize the panels themselves: drag the divider between the binder and the page, or between the page and the AI panel. Skrift remembers the window size, panel widths and layout between sessions.

Focus mode

View ▸ Focus Mode (⌥ ⌘ F) hides everything but your writing — no binder, toolbar or status bar — and narrows the page to a comfortable column. It uses typewriter scrolling, keeping the line you're writing centred on screen. Press Esc (or the ✕ Focus button) to leave.

Outline / Corkboard

View ▸ Outline / Corkboard… (⌥ ⌘ O) shows a synopsis card for every chapter in your Manuscript. Give each document a short synopsis and a status — To Do, Draft, Revised or Done — to plan and track your novel at a glance. The status appears as a coloured dot beside the document in the binder. Click a card's title to open that chapter. Each card also shows the chapter's tags, and the Show menu at the top of the window switches between the whole Manuscript, the current binder filter and your collections.

Quick Open

Quick Open (⌘ P) is the fastest way around a large project: start typing a document's name and press Enter (or use the arrow keys) to jump straight to it.

12Tags & Collections

A status dot tells you how far along a chapter is. Tags record what's in it: who appears, whose point of view it's told from, where it happens, whether it's raining. Once your scenes are tagged, Skrift can answer questions like "show me every scene with Anna" or "every chapter Ben narrates that isn't finished yet" in a couple of clicks. A Collection saves that question so you can come back to it any time.

Tag groups

Tags are organised into groups. Every project starts with three:

You can rename these, add your own groups (Subplot, Timeline, Mood…), or create tags with no group at all. Groups keep your filters easy to read and let Skrift enforce "one per document" where that makes sense.

Tagging a document

• Right-click a document in the binder and choose 🏷 Tags…. Click a tag to switch it on (it lights up in its colour); click it again to remove it.
• To create a tag, type its name in the box at the end of a group (for example New character…) and press Enter. The tag is created and added to the document in one go.
• In View ▸ Outline / Corkboard, each card shows its tags under the synopsis. Click ＋ Tag to add more, or the × on a tag to remove it. This is the quickest way to tag a whole book in one sitting.

A tagged document shows up to three small coloured dots in the binder, next to its status dot. Hover over the dots to see all of its tags.

Managing tags

View ▸ Manage Tags… (also on the 🏷 button at the top of the binder) lists every group and tag, with the number of documents using each one. From here you can:

• Rename a tag or group by editing its name. Every document picks up the new name straight away.
• Change a tag's colour by clicking its coloured dot.
• Tick or untick One per document for a group.
• Merge duplicates. Choose Merge into… beside "Anne" and pick "Anna": every document tagged Anne is re-tagged Anna, and Anne is removed.
• Click Show to filter the binder to every document with that tag.
• Delete a tag, which removes it from every document (your writing isn't touched), or delete a group, which keeps its tags as ungrouped tags.
• Add a group with the box at the bottom of the window.

Filtering the binder

Choose View ▸ Filter Documents by Tag… (⌥ ⌘ T), or click 🏷 at the top of the binder and choose Filter documents…. Then build your question from one or more rules:

• Tag is / is not a tag, for example Tag is Character: Anna.
• Status is / is not a status, for example Status is not Done.
• Text contains / doesn't contain a word or phrase, for example Text contains "rain". This searches each document's text and its synopsis, and ignores capital letters.

At the top of the window, choose whether documents must match all of the rules or any of them, and whether to search the Manuscript folder or the whole project. Trash and Templates are never searched. As you build the filter, the window shows how many documents match and lists their names.

Click Show in Binder. The binder hides everything that doesn't match, and the matching documents stay in their usual order inside their folders, so you can read a character's thread from beginning to end. A strip at the top of the binder describes the filter and counts the matches. Click ✎ on the strip to change the filter, or ✕ to see everything again. While a filter is on, dragging to reorder the binder is paused so nothing gets moved by accident.

Collections (saved searches)

When a filter is worth keeping, click Save as Collection… in the filter window and give it a name, such as Ben's chapters, Rain scenes or Needs revision. A collection saves the question, not a fixed list of documents, so it's always up to date. Tag a new scene POV: Ben and it appears in Ben's chapters the next time you open the collection.

• Open a collection from the 🏷 button at the top of the binder ▸ Collections. The binder filters to it, and the strip shows the collection's name.
• Change or delete a collection with 🏷 ▸ Edit collection (or ✎ on the strip while it's open). Adjust the rules and click Save Collection, or click Delete Collection. Deleting a collection never affects your documents or tags.
• Outline / Corkboard has a Show menu at the top. Switch it from the whole Manuscript to the current binder filter or to any collection to see only those cards.
• File ▸ Export / Compile can export a collection or the current binder filter. It's ideal for printing one character's storyline to read through in one sitting. (Book style always compiles the whole Manuscript.)

✦ AI tag suggestions

Tagging a finished draft by hand takes time, and a plain text search can't tell that a scene is set "in the rain" if you wrote "the gutters overflowed". With AI assistance switched on, Claude can suggest tags for you:

• One document: in its 🏷 Tags… window, click ✦ Suggest tags.
• The whole book: open Manage Tags… and click ✦ Suggest tags for every chapter…. Before anything is sent, Skrift tells you how many chapters and roughly how many words are involved. Click Stop at any point to keep the suggestions gathered so far.

Claude reads each chapter and chooses from your existing tags first. It proposes a new tag (marked NEW) only when something important has no tag yet, and never more than three per chapter. Nothing is applied until you've reviewed it: untick anything you disagree with, then click Apply. Each chapter is a separate AI request and appears in AI Cost Accounting. Very long chapters are trimmed to their first 12,000 characters or so.

Tags, groups and collections are saved inside your project file and travel with it, including through cloud sync. If you tag documents on two computers, the changes are combined.

13Templates

Templates let you reuse a document's structure — a character sheet, a scene skeleton, a chapter outline.

• Templates ▸ Insert Template… drops a template into your project.
• Templates ▸ Manage Templates… lets you rename, delete, or save the current document as a new global template.
• Global templates are available across every project; each project also has its own Templates folder.

14AI Assistance

Skrift includes optional AI help powered by Anthropic's Claude. It's completely off until you turn it on — when disabled, every AI feature is hidden.

A note on providers. At present, Skrift's AI assistance is set up to work with Anthropic's Claude only. Support for other AI providers may be added in a future update.

Turning it on

Open Settings, tick Enable AI assistance, and paste your Anthropic API key (there's a link in Settings to get one). Choose a model — a more capable one for richer prose, a faster one for quick tasks. Your key is stored only on your computer and used only to talk to Anthropic.

The AI panel

With AI on, a ✦ button appears; click it to open the AI panel on the right. Type in the box at the bottom and press Enter to send (⇧ Enter for a new line). Skrift responds in one of two ways:

• Ask a question ("What's a good name for a Norse blacksmith?") and the answer appears in the panel.
• Ask it to write something new ("Write chapter one from the breakdown", "continue this scene") and the new prose is added to the end of your open document (an empty document is simply filled).
• Ask it to rewrite or change the document ("tighten this chapter", "change Jim's dialogue to sound angrier", "rewrite it in present tense") and the AI returns the whole revised document, which replaces the current text. The rewrite is plain paragraphs, so any bold/italic, headings, notes, footnotes or images in that document are not carried over — use Revert if you need them back.
• Either way, a review bar appears above the page so you can Accept or Revert the change. If you move to another document while the AI is working, the result still goes into the document you asked about.
• If a reply is too long and gets cut off, Skrift says so and does not put it into your document — ask for a smaller part (a scene rather than a whole chapter) instead.

The first request is slower. When you first open Skrift, the opening AI request can take up to 30 seconds to reply while it wakes up and connects. Every request after that is much quicker — right up until you close the app, when the next one you open will warm up in the same way.

Automatic context

The AI always sees the document you have open, so "this chapter" or "this scene" means exactly that — for questions as well as edits.

When you ask it to write, rewrite or change something, it also reads any outline or chapter-breakdown document and your Characters and Places folders, so it stays true to your story without you attaching anything. Name those folders Characters and Places (as new projects do) for this to work. If there's more than fits in one request, the open document always comes first, then the outline, then characters and places — and the panel tells you if anything was left out.

Other chapters aren't included automatically. Use the ＋ Attach button to add any document from your project as extra context — for example the previous chapter. If you edit an attached document, the updated version is sent with your next message. Nothing else from your project is sent.

Right-click in the AI panel to Copy selected text, Copy message (the bubble you clicked), or Copy conversation. Clear panel starts a fresh conversation — the AI forgets the earlier chat, and any attached documents stay attached and are sent again with your next message.

Rewriting existing text

• Selective rewrite: select a passage, right-click, and choose Rewrite. You can set how much surrounding context to include — just the nearby text, the whole chapter, or relevant project notes.
• Whole-chapter rewrite: right-click a chapter in the binder and choose Rewrite chapter. The new version replaces the old, with an Accept/Revert bar so you're always in control.

Tag suggestions

Claude can also suggest tags for one chapter or for your whole manuscript, picking out the characters, point of view and setting of each scene for you to review. See Tags & Collections ▸ AI tag suggestions.

15AI Cost Accounting

Because AI requests cost money, Skrift keeps a running tally so there are no surprises. This only applies while AI is switched on.

• The status bar shows today's spend (for example ✦ £0.02 today). Click it to open the full accounting window.
• The accounting window lists every AI request grouped by day — newest first — with a short description of what it did, the tokens used, and the cost in pounds. Daily and all-time totals are shown at the bottom.
• Costs are converted to GBP using a live exchange rate and rounded up to the nearest penny.
• A Clear button resets the history if you'd like to start fresh.

The accounting window can also be opened with its keyboard shortcut (⌘ ⇧ A by default), which you can change in Settings.

16Importing

From Scrivener

On the welcome screen, choose Import Scrivener… and pick a Scrivener project. Skrift converts the binder structure and text (including bold, italic and underline), and brings across embedded images and PDFs. Your draft folders map to Manuscript, research to Research, and so on.

Word, Markdown & text documents

To bring a single document into your open project, use File ▸ Import Document… and pick a .docx, .md, or .txt file. Skrift converts its formatting and adds it as a new document (in the selected folder, or Manuscript by default). This is the quickest way to move existing chapters into Skrift.

Cover images, artwork & other files

To bring in a cover image (or any picture, PDF or file), add it to a folder rather than importing it as a document. The natural home for a cover is the Cover folder; artwork belongs in Illustrations, reference material in Research. Two ways to add one:

• Drag it from Finder straight onto the target folder in the binder.
• Right-click the folder and choose Add Image… or Add File….

The item is stored inside your project and can be previewed by clicking it. (Files over 25 MB are skipped to keep your project file lean. To place a picture within a chapter's text instead, use the image button on the toolbar while editing that document.)

17Export & Compile

When you're ready to share, submit or publish, compile your manuscript with File ▸ Export / Compile… (⌘ E).

What gets compiled

Choose Whole Manuscript to combine every document in your Manuscript folder, in order, each one starting a new chapter titled by its document name. You can also choose Current document only, the documents in the current binder filter, or a saved collection, which is handy for printing one character's storyline. (Book style always compiles the whole Manuscript.) Your notes are never included in an export.

Formats

• Word (.docx) — a standard manuscript layout (title page, double-spacing, chapter breaks, page headers) for agents and editors
• PDF — a clean, formatted document for sharing or printing
• EPUB — an e-book file for self-publishing and e-readers
• Markdown and Plain text — lightweight, universal formats

Set your Author name in Settings to have it printed on the title page and page headers of exported manuscripts. In trial mode, Plain Text export is available; a licence unlocks Word, PDF and EPUB.

Manuscript vs Book (typeset)

The Export window offers two styles:

• Manuscript — the standard double-spaced submission format for agents and editors (a surname/title page header, centred chapter titles).
• Book (typeset) — a finished, ready-to-publish book: single-spaced justified text, drop caps opening each chapter, ornamental scene breaks, an auto title page and copyright page, and a table of contents.

In Book style, Skrift also pulls in front and back matter from your binder. Every new project comes with a Front Matter folder (holding Dedication and Epigraph) and a Back Matter folder (holding Acknowledgements and About the Author). Fill in the ones you want and leave the rest — empty documents are skipped — and they'll be placed before and after your chapters. A picture in your Cover folder becomes the e-book cover. For PDF you can choose a print trim size (6 × 9 in and others) so the file is ready for a print-on-demand service.

For print, the Book-style PDF and Word files carry a page number at the foot of every page, and you can switch on a running header (your author name and title) in the Export window. (These appear on every page, numbered from the first — e-books ignore them, since e-readers create their own page positions.)

When you export a Book EPUB, Skrift checks the cover image and warns you if it's missing, low-resolution, or the wrong shape for a Kindle cover (which should be portrait, about 1.6:1, and at least 1600 px tall). It's only a reminder — you can export anyway, tick Don't show this again, or turn the check off under Settings. Remember the cover you upload to KDP when publishing is separate: a paperback needs a full wraparound cover (back, spine and front together) built from KDP's own template and sized to your page count.

If you're working in an older project that doesn't have these folders yet, choosing a Book export will offer to create them for you — with the same starter documents — then stop so you can fill them in before exporting.

18Registration & Licensing

Skrift is a one-time purchase. Until it's registered with a licence key it runs as a free trial — fully usable for writing, but with some features held back.

What the trial includes — and what it doesn't

The trial gives you the complete writing experience: the editor, formatting, page colours, notes, find & replace, spelling & grammar, read aloud, tags & binder filtering, statistics, templates, split view and backups are all fully available. Registering unlocks:

• AI assistance — writing, rewriting and the research chat
• All your projects — the trial opens only your first project; a licence opens them all
• Cloud sync across your devices
• Scrivener import
• Style analysis — the prose checker and its report
• Word, PDF and EPUB export — the trial exports plain text
• Collections and AI tag suggestions: saved searches, and Claude suggesting tags for your chapters

A gold ◆ Trial badge in the status bar shows when you're in trial mode, and Help ▸ About Skrift shows whether your copy is licensed and to whom.

Buying a licence

Choose Registration ▸ Buy License… (or the Buy button on the trial reminder) to open the Skrift store in your browser. After purchase you'll receive a licence key by email.

Registering your copy

Choose Registration ▸ Enter License…, paste the key from your email, and click Activate. Skrift unlocks straight away, and the About window will then show your copy as Licensed to [your name].

Using Skrift on up to three devices

A single Skrift licence can be activated on up to three devices — for example your desktop, laptop and a spare machine. Just choose Registration ▸ Enter License… and enter the same licence key on each computer.

If you replace a computer or reach the three-device limit, free up a slot first: on a device you no longer use, choose Registration ▸ Deactivate This Device…. That releases its activation so you can register Skrift on the new machine. You can re-activate any device later with the same key.

Working offline

Once registered, Skrift keeps working offline. It quietly re-checks your licence when you're next online, but you'll never be locked out simply for writing without an internet connection.

19Settings

Open Settings with ⌘ , or from the menu. You'll find:

AI

• Enable AI assistance. When it's off, every AI feature is hidden throughout the app.
• Your Anthropic API key (stored only on your computer) and the model to use.
• Default rewrite context scope (nearby text, chapter, or full project).
• The AI cost-accounting hotkey.

Appearance & Files

• App theme — Dark or Light. (Page colours in the toolbar still style the writing area separately.)
• Automatic timestamped backups — on or off.
• Check the cover image before a book export — on or off.
• Local projects folder (used by the welcome screen's Local tab).
• Default backup location for File ▸ Back up all Skrift files… (leave it clear to be asked each time).

Writing

• Default writing font and size (pasted text is normalised to match).
• Author name, printed on the title page and page headers of exported manuscripts.
• Tab size (how many spaces the Tab key inserts).

Spelling options (check while typing, grammar, British or American) live on the spelling bar itself; see Spelling & Grammar. Read-aloud voice and speed are set on the read-aloud bar.

Custom hotkeys

You can define your own shortcuts for inserting a chapter break (⁂), inserting a note, the spelling bar, document statistics and the accounting window. Click the field, then press the keys you want.

20Keyboard Shortcuts

Happy writing. 🖋️