Guide

01

Basics

• Where is my work saved?

  In your browser on this device. No account, no cloud. Export a backup before clearing site data.

• Document or Typst?

  Document is like Word. Typst is source with chapters. You can convert Document → Typst, not the other way.

• Offline?

  Yes, after the first load. PDF compiles in the tab. Search and new Qur'an/hadith fetches need the network once.

• Which device?

  Tablet, laptop, or desktop: the editor puts sources, reasoning, and the typeset page side by side, which needs the width. Phones get a short page instead; the phone app is not out yet.

• Advanced mode

  Toggle in the top bar. Adds formal patterns and structural checks. Same PDF either way.

02

Five stages

• Sources

  Paste any link (a journal page, arXiv, PubMed, a DOI) or search the literature. Tag each source with notes that flow into later stages, and check the whole library for retractions in one click.

• Canvas

  Arrange sources on a corkboard. Link related ones.

• Arguments

  Build claims with cited premises, separate from your source library.

• Structure

  Cluster sources into chapters. Re-clustering rewrites the chapter, not duplicates it.

• Write

  Draft with live PDF preview. Document and Typst both compile the same way.

03

Codex

• What it is

  One shape: an entity and an edge between two, not a schema per domain. Presets just pre-fill starting labels; nothing stops you adding your own.

• Board, Timeline, Table

  Three views of the same entities. Board pins and connects by hand. Timeline lays dated entities on an axis. Table sorts and paginates once a board gets crowded.

• Auto-arrange

  One click resets every entity to a tidy grid, including ones you never dragged. The fix for a board that's drifted into overlap.

• Fields & import

  Text, number, date, or a reference to another entity. Import a CSV or Excel file with fuzzy column matching, not an exact-header requirement.

• Export

  CSV, PNG of the current view, or a standalone HTML report. Hand any of them to someone without this app.

• Duplicates

  Flagged once two entities share a title, usually the same rows imported twice. Merge keeps one, fills in missing fields, moves the edges over.

04

Writing

• Slash menu

  Type / on an empty line for headings, lists, citations, Qur'an, bibliography, and more.

• Formatting

  Select text for the toolbar. ⌘B, ⌘I, ⌘E from the keyboard.

• Markdown

  # headings, - bullets, > quote, **bold**, *italic*.

• Dictation

  Not built in, on purpose. The microphone button points at Wispr Flow, which types into every window rather than only this one, and names the dictation your own machine already has: Fn Fn on macOS, Win + H on Windows.

• The handle in the margin

  Point at any block for a grip to its left. Drag it to move the block; click it to turn the block into a heading, list, quote, code block or callout, duplicate it, or delete it. The + beside it starts a new block underneath.

• Callouts

  A boxed aside: a note, a key point, or a caveat. The three tones are drawn in the same colours in the editor, in the PDF, and in exported Word and LaTeX.

• Columns for one passage

  Set just a passage in two or three columns while the rest of the paper stays as it is. Blocks go inside: a heading, a list, a figure. For a whole paper in columns, use Page setup instead.

• Cross-references

  Point at a heading or figure and the reference prints the number that target ends up with, for example "Section 3" or "Figure 2", and follows it when you move things. Delete the target and the reference turns red rather than breaking the build.

• Notes on a draft

  Select a passage, press ✎. The note is anchored to those words, lives in the Notes panel, and is never printed, not in the PDF, the .typ or the .tex. In a Word export it becomes a real Word comment.

• Command palette

  ⌘P opens one searchable list of every command: formatting, inserting, panels, text size, exports. Type a few letters and press Enter.

• Text size, focus mode, line width

  A−/A+ (or ⌘+ / ⌘− / ⌘0) set how large the prose reads on screen without touching the PDF. Reading ▸ Focus mode dims everything but the block you are in; typewriter scrolling keeps the current line near the middle; line width sets the measure.

• One line bigger than the rest

  Select it and use the size box beside the font picker, 8 to 48 pt, on those words only. Page setup sets the whole document; this is for a dedication or a couplet that has to stand apart. It survives into the PDF, Word and LaTeX.

• Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Pashto

  Type it anywhere. Any glyph the document font cannot draw falls back to Noto Naskh Arabic, which covers all four. Latin fonts have no Arabic script at all, and the Qur'anic Amiri face has no Urdu-specific letters. For proper Urdu typography, pick Noto Nastaliq Urdu for the document or for the selected lines.

• Pictures

  Insert an image from the toolbar; it is stored on the paper and typeset into the PDF. Click the caption to write one. Point at a picture for its own bar: S, M, L, Full and Replace. An image the paper no longer holds prints a marker on the page instead of failing the whole preview.

05

Page setup

• Layout presets

  Seventeen, in three groups. Journal & conference: APA, IEEE two-column, ACM, Springer LNCS, Elsevier, Nature, Science, PLOS, conference abstract. Thesis & coursework: thesis at 1.5 or double spacing, Chicago/Turabian, MLA, course essay. Book & report: monograph (B5), technical report, grant proposal. One click sets paper size, margins, point size, spacing, columns, and heading numbering to the published guideline, which each preset names when you hover it.

• Paper & margins

  26 paper sizes: A-series, B/C envelopes, US Letter/Legal, business cards, presentation slides. Margins in cm, in, mm, or pt. Up to three columns.

• Headers, footers & page numbers

  Independent header and footer text. Page numbers left, center, or right, in their own size, not just an on/off toggle. Five numbering styles (1, I, i, a, A).

• Numbering that changes partway: a thesis

  Every page break can start a new regime: its own header and footer, its own number style (1, 2, 3 · i, ii, iii · I, II, III · a, b, c · A, B, C · or none), and a restart at 1. So the title pages and contents carry no number, the acknowledgements through the abstract run i, ii, iii, and chapter one starts again at 1.

• Headings

  Numbering as 1. / 1.1 / legal (I, A, 1) / none. Line spacing set independently for each of six heading levels.

• Fonts

  Around a hundred families ship with the app: serif, sans, and monospace, each in regular, bold, italic, and bold italic. They load only when a paper actually uses one. Families without ALA-LC transliteration glyphs (ḥ ṣ ʿ ā) are marked as such rather than hidden. You can also upload your own .ttf/.otf.

• A font that isn't here

  Pasted source often names a font the browser has no access to. The typesetter runs in the tab and cannot see the fonts installed on your computer. Typst does not fail on that; it silently sets your paper in something else. So a bar offers the nearest available face (most are metric-compatible: Liberation Serif and Times New Roman → Tinos, Arial → TeX Gyre Heros, Georgia → Gelasio), or walks you through fetching the real one from Google Fonts and uploading it. For fonts licensed with Windows, macOS or Office it says plainly that no legitimate download exists.

• Pasted Typst that won't compile

  Source written elsewhere often mixes LaTeX names into Typst. The error panel offers the repair as a button (#vspace → #v, #textbf → strong, #includegraphics → image, and so on) or adds a missing #. It rewrites your own source, so ⌘Z takes it back.

06

Citations

• Citing

  ⌘K or the Cite button. Web results are saved to your library first.

• Paste a link

  Any link becomes a source: a journal page, an arXiv or PubMed address, a DOI, a Nature article id, a Wikipedia page. Where a browser genuinely cannot read the page (most news sites block it), you get a webpage entry with its address and access date to title yourself, rather than a guessed one.

• Check for retractions

  One button asks Crossref, which holds the Retraction Watch database, whether anything you saved has since been retracted, corrected, or had an expression of concern published. Retracted work keeps getting cited for years because reference managers never go back and look. A retraction shows as a red flag with a link to the notice, and the verdict is kept. Sources without a DOI cannot be checked, and are counted as skipped rather than passed.

• Bibliography

  Built from what you cite. Missing keys are flagged.

• Styles

  Fifty-nine styles, grouped by discipline and searchable, each one compiled and checked. The picker shows what a style actually prints next to its name, because that is the real difference: (Turing, 1950) for APA, [1] for IEEE, (1) for Vancouver, ¹ for Nature, and for Chicago notes or MHRA, a raised number with the full reference in a footnote at the bottom of the page. Upload your own .csl if yours is not there.

• Reading a number

  Under a numbering style the editor shows the same marker the PDF will, hovering it names the source, and the References panel lists the number beside each entry, so a bare [1] is never a dead end.

• Keys

  Cite keys come from author + year; rename in References to update everywhere.

07

Qur'an & hadith

• What gets inserted

  Verse or report snapshotted onto the paper (Arabic, translation, locator) so it works offline.

• Bibliography

  Primary texts cite by locator (Qur'an 4:35). Tafsīr and fatwa appear in the bibliography.

• Gradings

  Every grader is named. Disagreement is shown, never collapsed.

• Limits

  No madhab routing or chain verdicts. Structural checks comment on form, not truth or soundness.

08

Arguments

• Insert or copy

  Insert keeps the block linked. Copy as Typst or plain sentences.

• Structural check

  Form only, not truth or authenticity. Printed beside the label in the PDF.

• Usūl patterns

  naṣṣ, qiyās, ijmāʿ, istiḥsān. Qiyās without ʿilla is flagged incomplete.

09

Export

• PDF

  Export PDF compiles what you preview. Self-contained fonts.

• Word (.docx)

  A real Word file written from your document: headings, formatting, lists, tables, images with captions, callouts, the bibliography, and a contents field. Footnotes become Word footnotes and your notes become Word comments, so a supervisor can reply with tracked changes. Typst equations, argument cards, and cross-references are reported after the export rather than dropped quietly.

• LaTeX (.tex)

  For a co-author who works in LaTeX. Pair it with the refs.bib from the project zip; anything without a faithful equivalent comes back as a warning instead of a surprise at submission.

• Project zip

  ⌘S → main.typ, chapters, refs.bib, assets. Opens in any Typst install.

• Backup

  Export backup on home → one JSON with every paper. Import before switching machines.

• History

  Checkpoints as you work. Restore replaces the document; the prior checkpoint is your undo.

10

Licences

• Typst

  WebAssembly typesetting (Apache-2.0). PDF runs on your machine only.

• Fonts & data

  EB Garamond, Fraunces, Hanken Grotesk, Amiri Quran (SIL OFL). Literature from OpenAlex, PubMed, Semantic Scholar.

• Shama Writer

  MIT: use, change, ship, with copyright notice kept.