Images in Deckle

Deckle handles three distinct kinds of image, all drawn from one shared library: an image inside your text, a small ornament next to a chapter title, and a full-bleed cover image on a title page or Part divider. Each renders completely differently, even though you upload them the same way.

What You Can Do

• Insert an image directly into your text, with five size options including a true full-page-bleed layout.
• Add a caption to any inline image.
• Set a chapter's title-ornament image, or a full-bleed cover image for a title page or Part divider.
• Browse every image you've ever uploaded to the project, rename it, and clean up whatever isn't currently used.
• Give a Codex character or location a portrait, plus a small gallery of additional reference images.

Inserting an Inline Image

1. Click Insert Image in the editor toolbar.
2. Upload a new image, or switch to Browse to reuse one already in your project.
3. Give it a name and alt text if you want.
4. With the image selected, choose a size from the toolbar: S, M, L, XL, or FPB (Full Page Bleed: the image fills an entire page on its own, and your text resumes on the next page).
5. Click the caption area under the image to add or edit a caption.

Chapter Ornaments and Cover Images

The same image well appears in a chapter's header area and on a title page or Part divider, but it renders differently depending on where it is:

• On a regular chapter, it's a small ornament image near the title, sized by a single project-wide percentage (set in Styles), and positioned above, below, or beside the title (or as a background).
• On a title page or Part divider, it renders full-bleed, filling the entire page edge to edge, cropped to cover the whole canvas.

Managing Your Image Library

Open the Insert Image dialog's Browse tab to see every image currently in your project, whether or not it's in use anywhere right now. Rename any image's display label, or click Remove unused images to permanently delete every image not currently referenced by any chapter, title page, or your scene-break style. This scans your whole project first, so nothing actually in use is ever touched.

Codex Portraits

Give a Codex character or location entry a portrait from its own upload button, separate from the Insert Image dialog. Beyond the single portrait, an entry can also hold a small gallery of extra reference images, viewable full-size by clicking through them.

A Couple of Things Worth Knowing

💡 Removing unused images is permanent. It doesn't go through Trash. Double-check you actually want to lose an image before using the cleanup button, since there's no recovery step afterward beyond restoring from a project backup.

💡 Full Page Bleed only works as a true full-page layout in PDF and EPUB. In a DOCX export, an FPB image falls back to a plain full-width inline image with no page break, worth knowing if Word compatibility matters for a particular manuscript.

💡 Editing a caption after you've already inserted the image only shows up in PDF and EPUB exports, not DOCX. DOCX only carries whatever caption text you typed in at the moment you inserted the image. If you need a DOCX export with an updated caption, re-type it during insertion rather than editing it afterward.

💡 Chapter ornaments and title-page/Part cover images don't appear in DOCX exports at all. Only inline body images carry over to Word. This is a real gap in the DOCX pipeline, not a setting to adjust.