Templates, saving and settings
Documenta's welcome window and templates, your own templates, autosave, spell checking and every tab of the Settings window.
Welcome window and templates
At launch Documenta shows the welcome window: New Blank Document and Open… on the left, templates and recent documents on the right. Reopen it with File › New from Template… (⇧ ⌘ N).
The ten ready-made templates:
| Template | What it contains |
|---|---|
| Blank | Start from scratch |
| Letter | Address and signature |
| Report | Numbered sections, contents, table |
| Thesis | Title page, chapters, figures, notes |
| Notes | Points, ideas and to-dos |
| Minutes | Agenda, decisions, action items |
| Manuscript | Standard submission format |
| Résumé | Experience, education and skills |
| Quote | Items, calculated totals, terms |
| Self-Declaration | Declaration in lieu of certificate (Italian autocertificazione) |
Your own templates
File › Save as Template… saves the open document as a template, with its text, styles and page setup. Your templates appear in the welcome window and in File › New from My Template; they are DOCX files in the app’s templates folder (Show Templates Folder). In Settings › Templates you create documents from them, rename them and move them to the Trash; documents already created from a template don’t change.
Saving
- With Save automatically (on to start with), documents saved at least once save themselves while you type, every 60 seconds unless you choose another interval (from 5 to 600), and when you close them. macOS versions stay available (File › Revert To).
- Turned off in Settings › File, documents are saved only with File › Save (⌘ S) and, when you close a modified document, Documenta asks whether to save it.
Writing and proofing
- macOS spelling and grammar checking, automatic correction, an automatic or chosen spelling language.
- Check each text in its own language: text you gave a language (Format › Language) is checked with its own dictionary.
- Personal Dictionary: words you add (right-click › Add to Personal Dictionary) are never marked as errors, in any language. The list can be imported and exported.
- Substitutions: smart quotes and dashes, links detected while typing, and Custom Replacements: a word or symbol becomes the text you choose when you type a space or punctuation mark after it. ⌘ Z brings back what you typed.
- Find and Replace… (⌥ ⇧ ⌘ F): match case, whole words, regular expression, in selection only; formatting can be found and replaced too (paragraph style, bold, italic, underline, highlight). With no text to find, only the formatting is searched. For a quick search there is the find bar on ⌘ F.
- Edit › Read Aloud reads from the selection, or from the cursor to the end, with the system voice for the text’s language; the word being read is highlighted. Typing stops the reading.
- Edit › Look Up in Dictionary (⌃ ⌘ D).
The Settings tabs
Documenta › Settings (⌘ ,):
- General: app language, what to do at launch (welcome window, blank document or nothing), default zoom, Documenta as the default app for documents, restoring the defaults.
- Appearance: look of windows and bars (automatic, light, dark), page appearance, Pageless, page layout, inspector layout and panels for new windows.
- Writing: spelling and grammar, personal dictionary, substitutions, pasting with the document’s style, word count and reading speed.
- Text and Fonts: font, size, line spacing and paragraph spacing of new blank documents; page number in the footer of new documents.
- Page: paper, orientation and margins (Normal, Narrow, Wide or Custom) for new documents, layout and column guides, unit of measure.
- File: default format for new documents, autosave, warning about missing fonts.
- Templates: your own templates.