WriteFlow Help
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# The WriteFlow Elements

In WriteFlow your information is not stored in files, but in one database. When you look at a document, you can see the effect of this basic decision. When you start to write, a new line in our database is started. When you then decide that some text you just wrote is a quote, this quote get's its own line in the database and so on.

This approach permits us to store a lot of information about every such text element.

When you first start up WriteFlow, the elements are by default visible through Element Tags, they look like a colored bubble around every text you write. When you change the element type, i.e. when you want to define some text as quote, you'll see that quote element has got a different colour. In this short film you see how some "default" text is transformed into a "quote".

To easily change the colors and the Text Styles of your document, you can just change the Output Styles here. Just play around a little bit.

When you want to write, probably you don't want to be bothered with the Element Tags. You can therefore just make them invisibile, by using the Command Tool and choosing "Toggle Tag Visibility".

The WriteFlow Elements are marked with the Element Tags, which allow you to instantly see the beginning and the end of an Element. Every element can be addressed individually to attach keywords or a note, or to change the Element Type. The Element you see above is a "Default" Element. You can easily change the Element Type in the Inspector, or even better in the Command Tool with the "Define as..." command.
Now, every Element Type has a Text Style. You can change the Text Style directly in the Format-Inspector, or you can do it here:

Here you can create new Element Types by clicking on the "+" on the bottom of the middle colomn of this window. You have do so every time you want to use text for which you do not already find the matching Element Type. If you want to write for example text aligned to the right, you'll have to create a new Element Type and with it you'll need a new Text Style as well. Normally you'll always create a new Text Style for every new Element Type, as you can see in the following window:

You can see that this will create a new Element Type for all the Output Styles available. While the Element Types are universal, the Text Styles are not. Depending on the Output Styles, you can attribute different Text Styles to every Element Type. The Element Types are the underlying structure, while the Output Styles are bundles of Text Styles which define the actual appearance, much like in CSS. We needed this to have more information about the way you want to use the text in a document, especially to know if you want to use some special text as a quote.

It surely takes some time to get used to it, but you'll appreciate the cleanlyness of the appearance and the possibilty to address the Elements by just moving the cursor into them.