About This Guide

Welcome to the Guide. It explains how to use Spleen as a quiet place for writing, shaping, revising, and exporting longer works. It is not meant to be read from beginning to end before you start writing. It is meant to stay nearby: something you can open when you want to understand part of the interface, remember how a feature works, or find your way back when the structure of a project starts to grow.

Spleen is built around the idea that writing is rarely a single straight line. A project may begin as a handful of fragments, grow into a draft, gather notes and annotations, branch into revisions, and eventually leave the editor as a finished export. This guide follows that same movement. It starts with the basic shape of the application, then moves through projects, the writing workspace, editing tools, notes, snapshots, preferences, and export.

The aim is not to document every possible habit a writer might have, but to explain the tools clearly enough that you can make them your own. Some writers will use Spleen as a focused drafting space. Others will use it to manage novels, collections, essays, poems, manuals, or hybrid projects. The guide tries to support both approaches without forcing a particular method.

How this guide is organised

This guide is arranged around the normal life of a writing project. Getting Started introduces Spleen, takes you through a first project, tours the workspace, and explains how projects are organised. Projects covers the projects overview, imports, templates, details, statuses, archiving, and actions that affect several projects at once.

Writing brings the workspace and the editor together. The Writing Workspace covers the main screen, project sidebar, search, project switcher, and Atmosphere. The Editor focuses on working with text itself, including the floating toolbar, formatting, autosave, focus controls, and Zen Mode.

Notes, Annotations, and Snapshots covers the contextual tools that sit beside your document. These features help you keep reminders, pin comments to specific passages, and preserve earlier versions of your work while the draft changes. Preferences explains how to adjust the writing space, appearance, and editor behaviour. Sharing and Exporting explains how to share live work with a reader or prepare a project in formats such as PDF, EPUB, HTML, Markdown, and Spleen Archive.

Account, Plans, and Billing explains personal information, sign-in methods, password and two-step security, shared links, plans, subscriptions, payments, invoices, and account deletion.

Help and Reference is there for lookup rather than reading in order. Use it when something does not behave as expected, when you want to contact support or report a bug, when you want to check a term, or when you want to see what has changed.

Finding a guide article

Choose Search the guide in the Help Center header, or press Ctrl + K on Windows and Linux or Command + K on macOS. Type at least two characters. Search checks article titles and text, then shows matching passages together with their place in the guide. Choose a result to open it.

The guide tree follows the article you are reading. It opens the sections along the current path, highlights the article, and brings that row into view. You can still fold or unfold other sections yourself. On a smaller screen, use the sidebar button below the Help Center header to open the tree.

Conventions used in this guide

This guide uses a few simple conventions to keep instructions readable. Interface elements such as buttons, tabs, and menu items are written by name, usually exactly as they appear in Spleen. For example, New project, Preferences, Export, Notes, Annotations, and Snapshots refer to visible controls in the application.

When several steps are connected, they are written in the order you should follow them. For example, Preferences → Editor settings means you should open Preferences first and then choose Editor settings. Export formats may be written as PDF, EPUB, HTML, Markdown, or Spleen Archive, matching the names shown in Spleen.

Spleen uses a few terms in a specific way. A project is the complete writing project. A section is a container used to organise documents. A document is an individual piece of writing. Notes are freeform reminders attached to a document, while annotations are pinned to selected passages of text. Snapshots are saved checkpoints of a document over time.

The guide assumes that your interface may change slightly as Spleen evolves. Some labels or controls may look a little different from the version you are using, especially while Spleen is still improving. The underlying idea should remain the same even when a detail has moved or been renamed.