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Introduction to Documenta

What Documenta, the word processor for Mac, is: requirements, the document window, the inspector, the status bar and the app's principles.

What is Documenta?

Documenta is a native word processor for Mac, written in SwiftUI and AppKit. You write on pages laid out like paper and open, edit and save documents in their own format: Word (.docx and .doc), OpenDocument (.odt), RTF and plain text.

Requirements: macOS 15 Sequoia or later, on a Mac with Apple silicon or Intel. The interface is in English and Italian; choose the language in Settings › General › App language (the app needs a restart).

Principles

  1. The file keeps its format. DOCX and ODT have their own reader and writer: they don’t go through the macOS importers, which lose images, links and tables. An opened document is saved in the same format. What is kept, format by format, is in Formats and compatibility.
  2. No network. The app runs in the macOS sandbox without permission to connect to the Internet: no accounts, analytics or third-party SDKs. Documents stay on your Mac or in the cloud service you choose, such as iCloud Drive.
  3. Everything can be undone. Undo and redo have no limit; operations on tables, objects and chapters also undo in a single step.

The document window

  • Toolbar: paragraph style, font and size, bold, italic, underline, color and highlight, alignment, lists, table, text box, shapes and the + button for other insertions.
  • Outline (on the left, ⌥ ⌘ O): the document’s headings, indented by level. See Long documents.
  • Inspector (on the right, ⌥ ⌘ I): text, paragraph, page, document and the selected object or table. In Settings › Appearance › Inspector layout you choose how it looks:
    • Tabs: Style, Page and Document, as in Pages, plus a tab for the selected table or object;
    • Sections: one column of sections you expand and collapse;
    • Icons: a bar with one icon per category; the Table panel appears when the cursor is in a table.
  • Status bar (at the bottom): current page and total, words and characters, the word goal, a notice when change tracking is on, the Single Page and Two Pages buttons and the zoom.

View

From the View menu:

  • Zoom from 25% to 400%: Zoom In (⌘ >), Zoom Out (⌘ <), Actual Size (⌘ 0) and Fit Width.
  • Page Layout: single page, two pages side by side, or automatic, which puts them side by side when the window is wide enough.
  • Pageless (⌥ ⌘ P): one continuous sheet. Printing and PDF are still split into pages.
  • Page appearance: light, dark or automatic. The dark page is on screen only: printouts and files stay black on white.
  • Focus Mode (⇧ ⌘ F): panels hide and the text outside the cursor’s paragraph fades, notes and images included.
  • Show Ruler (⌘ R) and Show Word Count.

The longest document that gets paginated is 2,000 pages: beyond that a bar tells you so, and the text after the last page is visible only in Pageless view. The text still stays in the document and is saved.

Next steps