The formatting toolbar above your text controls how a passage is structured and marked: bold, italic, block types like Blockquote or Verse, scene breaks, links, while a completely separate panel, Styles, controls how your whole book looks when exported. They don't overlap: changing your font or trim size in Styles never touches what the toolbar does, and nothing in the toolbar changes your book's typeface or page size.
What You Can Do
- Apply bold, italic, underline, and a text color to any selection, or arm Revision Mode to have new text colored automatically as you type.
- Switch a paragraph's block type, Blockquote, Verse, Conversation, and five others, from one dropdown.
- Insert a scene break, a link, an image, a comment, or a footnote/endnote.
- Use bulleted or numbered lists.
- Type markdown-style shortcuts (like
>for a blockquote) instead of reaching for the toolbar.
The Toolbar
- Bold (Ctrl/Cmd+B), Italic (Ctrl/Cmd+I), Underline (Ctrl/Cmd+U), and a text color picker.
- Block type dropdown: switches the current paragraph between: Normal text, Subheading, Blockquote (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+B), Attribution, Verse, Written Note, Conversation, and Inset Block. Clicking the active type again switches it back to Normal text.
- Lists: bulleted (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+8) and numbered (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+7).
- Scene Break: inserts a scene-break divider (see document types for how this differs from starting a new Scene document).
- Insert Image, Insert/Edit Link, Add Comment (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+C), Insert Footnote/Endnote (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+F).
- Undo (Ctrl/Cmd+Z) and Redo (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Z, or Ctrl/Cmd+Y).
On a narrow window, less-used buttons collapse into a "More formatting options" menu. The order they disappear in is footnote, then comment, then link, then image, then scene break, then lists, while bold, italic, underline, color, the block-type dropdown, and undo/redo always stay visible.
Inserting a Link
Click the link button (or select linked text and click it again to edit). Choose External URL for a normal web link (https:// is added automatically if you leave it off) or Doc Link to search for and link directly to another document in your project. Click the link button again while your cursor is inside an existing link to edit or remove it.
A Couple of Things Worth Knowing
💡 There's no strikethrough, inline code, or code block button. Deckle's toolbar is deliberately scoped to prose formatting, not general text markup.
💡 Typing # doesn't create a heading, unlike many other editors. Deckle's only heading-like block, Subheading, is dropdown-only with no typing shortcut. > for Blockquote is the one block type that does have a typing shortcut.
💡 Straight quotes and dashes convert automatically as you type. -- becomes a real em dash, and straight quotes become curly quotes based on context. This isn't optional and doesn't need to be turned on.
💡 Internal document links behave differently across export formats. They become real clickable jumps in EPUB and PDF, but always degrade to plain, unlinked text in DOCX, since Word's export pipeline has no way to represent an in-document jump target. External web links stay clickable in all three.
FAQ
How do I make a heading in Deckle?
Use the block-type dropdown and choose Subheading. There's no typing shortcut for it, unlike Blockquote's >.
Will a link to another chapter still work after I export to Word?
No. Internal document links only stay clickable in EPUB and PDF exports. In DOCX, they render as plain text, since Word's export has no mechanism for an in-document jump.
Do I need to manually convert straight quotes to curly quotes?
No. It happens automatically as you type, and again at export time for anything typed elsewhere and pasted in.
What's the difference between the Verse block and just writing verse in a normal paragraph?
Verse is a distinct block type with its own styling controls in the Styles panel, separate from body text, so you can give poetry or song lyrics different formatting from your prose without manually adjusting each instance.