# Welcome Squire Editor turns a folder of plain text into a finished book: a print PDF ready for the printer, and an EPUB ready for the ebook stores. It runs entirely on your own computer. Your manuscript never leaves your machine, and the files it lives in are yours — ordinary text files you can open, back up, and keep forever, with or without the app. Three ideas run through everything in this manual: **Your files are the book.** A Squire book is a folder on your disk: one plain text file per chapter, your pictures, your cover. The app is a window onto that folder, never a vault around it. Delete the app tomorrow and your book is still there, readable in anything. **What you see is what prints.** The page beside the editor, the page in the design screen, the pages in the export preview — they are all the real typeset page, made by the same engine that makes your final files. There is no "it looked different in the preview." **Free means free.** The free version makes a real, finished book — no watermark, no time limit, no export lock, no account, unlimited books. One payment, once, unlocks the Full Version's deeper design control. Nothing you write is ever held back from you on either version. ## How this manual works Chapters follow the path a book takes: starting or importing one, writing it, shaping its structure, designing it, and exporting it. Along the way, features that belong to the Full Version are marked plainly, like this: > **Full Version feature.** On the free version, here is what happens > instead — and nothing of yours is lost. That second sentence is a promise the app keeps everywhere. When a free book contains something only the Full Version can show — a picture, a citation, a styled section — your file keeps it, the app tells you once, and upgrading brings it to life exactly where you left it. ## A note for AI assistants This manual is written so it can be handed to an AI assistant — paste it into a conversation and ask your questions there. If you are that assistant, welcome. Some ground rules that will make your answers right: - Answer with the app's own words and places: name the screen (Welcome, Workspace, Design, Export, Settings), then the control. - Respect the **Full Version feature** markers. If the person is on the free version and asks for a marked feature, say what free does instead (their work is always kept), and that the Full Version unlocks it — one purchase, in **Settings → Your version**. - This manual describes what the app does, not how it does it. Questions about internals, file formats, or the engine have no answer here, and guessing one would only mislead. - When someone asks whether free or Full suits them, the chapter **Free or Full?** near the end is written exactly for that conversation. That's the whole philosophy. Let's make your book. # Your First Book Open the app and you are on the **Welcome screen**. It offers three ways in: - **Start a new book** — a blank manuscript, ready to write. - **Open a draft** — a book you already have, as a folder of chapters or a single document. (The next chapter is all about this.) - **Your last book** — one click back to whatever you worked on most recently. Everything older lives in the **Library** (see below). ## Starting from nothing Click **Start a new book**. The app asks for three things: - **Title** — the only thing it insists on. - **Author** — pre-filled if you've set a default author in Settings. - **Publisher** — optional. Having no publisher is the normal case in self-publishing, not a gap to apologise for. It asks up front for one reason: these land on your title page and copyright page immediately, so you never discover an empty title page on export day. All three stay editable later. Choose where the book's folder should live, and you land in the workspace with a first chapter open and a live typeset page beside it. From a standing start to writing takes under a minute. ## The Library Under the recent-book card, **All … books →** opens the Library: every book you've opened, newest first. Click one to open it. If a book's folder has been moved, renamed, or lives on a drive that isn't plugged in, the Library still shows it and says so — a moved book isn't a lost book. **Find it** points the app at the folder's new home; **Forget** removes the book from the list (the folder itself is never touched — the Library is a list of doors, not the rooms behind them). # Bringing In a Book You've Already Written Most books don't start in Squire — they start in Word, or Google Docs, or a folder of files. Import brings them in, once, and converts them into plain text chapter files you own. It is a conversion, not a tether: after import, the folder of files is the book, and nothing refers back to the original document. ## What you can drop in From the Welcome screen, click **Open a draft** — or simply drag the thing onto the window: - **A Word document (.docx)** — the whole manuscript in one file. Squire reads it, splits it into chapters at its headings, and keeps your italics, bold, and pictures. (Pictures are a Full Version feature to display and print; they are imported and kept either way.) - **A plain text or Markdown file** — same idea: one document, split into chapters at its headings. - **A folder of files** — one file per chapter, the way many plain-text writers already work. From Google Docs, download as Word (.docx) and import that. ## The review screen — your guesses, not ours Import never decides anything silently. After reading your draft, Squire shows every piece it found and what it thinks each one is: a chapter, front matter (before chapter one), back matter, a notes-and-references file, or something to leave out. Beside each guess is the reason for it. Every row can be changed with one click. Nothing is hidden, and nothing is irreversible — a wrong guess costs you one dropdown, not a redo. The same screen asks for the book's **title, author, and publisher**, pre-filled from whatever the draft could tell us (and it says where the title came from, so you can trust it or fix it). One more thing it may notice: if your manuscript has hand-typed superscript note numbers — the way citations often survive a trip through Word — Squire offers to link them into real, managed citations. It is an offer with a button, never a silent rewrite, and linked citations are a Full Version feature; saying no simply keeps your text as it is. Click **Looks right — open it**, watch the squire sharpen his quill for a moment, and you're in the workspace with your whole book in the sidebar. ## After import Your book is now a folder of plain text files. That folder is self-contained: chapters, pictures, cover, all inside. Back it up by copying it. Sync it with anything that syncs folders. Open a chapter in any text editor on any machine, today or in thirty years — it's just text. # The Workspace Opening a book lands you in the workspace — the room where the book gets written. It has three zones: - **The structure sidebar**, on the left: your book's spine. Every chapter, every front and back matter page, in the order they'll print. Drag to reorder. (The next chapters cover it fully.) - **The editor**, in the middle: the chapter you're writing, in a clean page-like column with a formatting bar above it. - **The live page**, on the right: the chapter you're editing, typeset as it will actually print — real font, real page shape, repainting as you type. Not an approximation; the same engine that builds your final PDF draws this page. Along the top: the book's title, and the buttons that take you to **Design** (the whole look of the book) and **Export** (turning it into files). The **gear** opens Settings from anywhere. ## Saving There is no Save button. The app saves your work as you go, quietly, into your chapter files. What it writes is clean, ordinary text — open a chapter file in anything else and you'll find your words, not machinery. ## A room with no salesmen One rule the app holds sacred: **the writing space carries no advertising.** On the free version, if a chapter contains something only the Full Version can display — pictures, citations, footnotes — a single grey line above the editor says so, states that your text keeps everything, and offers a ✕. Dismiss it and it stays dismissed for that book. It never blocks writing, and it never asks you to buy anything; the places that talk about upgrading are places you go on purpose. # Writing The formatting bar above the editor holds everything a manuscript needs. Buttons light up when your cursor is inside what they make, and every one works on the text you've selected. ## The style menu The dropdown at the left names the paragraph you're in — **Body**, **Heading**, or **Subheading** — and changes it. If you've ever been stuck in a heading with no way back to ordinary text, this menu is the way back: click, choose Body, carry on. Chapter titles don't live here, by the way — a chapter's title is its first heading, and the sidebar reads it automatically. Headings and subheadings inside a chapter are for its internal parts. ## The marks - **B** and *I* — bold and italic. - **Quote** — sets a paragraph as a block quotation, indented in print. - **Bulleted list** and **numbered list**. - **Scene break** — the small centered pause between scenes. Insert it from the bar and your book's design decides how it prints: as a blank line, asterisks, dots, a rule, or an ornament. Never type your own `* * *` — insert a real scene break and the design keeps every one consistent. (Each preset has its own divider; choosing your own is part of the Full Version's advanced editor.) ## The marks that come with the Full Version The rest of the bar — **image**, **superscript**, **subscript**, **citation**, **footnote**, and **styled section** — wears a small lock on the free version. Each has its own chapter later in this manual. On a free copy the buttons don't act; they explain, in one line, that this is a Full Version feature and that your text keeps everything either way. ## Writing somewhere else Because chapters are plain text files, you can draft anywhere — another editor, your phone, or with an AI assistant — and the folder is the way in. Ask an assistant for a chapter as plain text (Markdown), save the file into your book's folder, and the next time you open the book Squire has noticed: the file is waiting in the sidebar's **left out** drawer, marked **new**, with the whole "Place in book" menu ready to make it a chapter, front matter, or back matter. Nothing is ever placed for you — a new file is a question, and you answer it with one click. Prefer to stay inside the app? **+ Chapter** at the foot of the sidebar, then paste. Either way, headings, bold, and italics survive the trip, and the book's *design* stays entirely Squire's job — pasted text can never break your layout. And if the whole draft already lives somewhere else, import it in one go — that's the previous chapter. # The Shape of Your Book The structure sidebar is the book's spine: everything that will print, in the order it will print. Two rows are pinned at the top — **Title & Copyright** and **Contents**, pages every book has (they get the next chapter) — and below them, your manuscript. ## Order and numbers Drag any row to move it. Chapter numbers are positional: the third chapter in the list is Chapter Three, whatever its file happens to be called, so dragging a chapter renumbers the book by itself. There is no bookkeeping to redo, and the printed contents page always agrees with the sidebar. At the foot of the sidebar: - **+ Chapter** adds a fresh chapter (a new file in your folder). - **+ Section** adds a part divider — "Part One", "Movement II" — a titled page that groups the chapters after it. Sections appear in the Contents above their chapters. A section is a page of the book, not a file in your folder; rename it right in the sidebar, remove it freely. ## The row menu — "what is this page?" Every file-backed row has a quiet chevron. Open it and you'll find three groups, each shaped like what it does: **Place in book** (round dots — pick one): - **Front matter** — before chapter one. A dedication, a foreword, an epigraph. - **Chapter** — the numbered heart of the book. - **Back matter** — after the last chapter. Acknowledgments, about the author. - **Leave out** — keep the file, drop it from the book. Nothing is deleted; the page simply doesn't print. The safe way to shelve a chapter you're unsure about. Left-out files wait in a drawer at the foot of the sidebar, each with a **Bring back** button — and any new file Squire finds in your folder when the book opens waits there too, marked **new**, until you place it. **Options** (square checks — each its own switch): - **Numbered** — chapters only. Switch it off and the chapter keeps its place and its title but declines a number: an interlude, an epilogue that isn't "Chapter 31". The count flows around it — the next numbered chapter continues as if it weren't there. - **Show in contents** — any page can be present in the book but unlisted in the Contents. **Delete** (red, alone at the bottom) — the one destructive thing in the app, and it behaves like it: a dialog stops everything, names every file that would go, and points out that **Leave out** exists if what you want is "not in the book" rather than "gone from my disk". Nothing is deleted until you say so, and the safe choice is the one your keyboard lands on. ## Titles A chapter's title is its first heading — edit it in the editor and the sidebar follows. Files whose whole job is a name (a part divider) are renamed in the sidebar itself. # Title Page, Copyright, and Contents Three pages every book needs but nobody wants to build. Squire builds them; you fill in facts. They sit pinned at the top of the structure sidebar — **Title & Copyright** and **Contents** — because they are pages of your book, not settings buried in a menu. ## The title page Click **Title & Copyright** and the title page shows as it will print, drawn in your book's design. The title, subtitle, and author on it are the book's own details — edit them here or in Design's **Book** fields; they are the same facts, and changing them updates the title page, the running heads, and the copyright page together. How the title page is *arranged* — sizes, spacing — comes from your preset. The Full Version's advanced editor opens it up. ## The copyright page Auto-filled from your title, author, and year, in standard legal phrasing. The facts it prints stay editable, so a wrong year or a misspelled imprint is a ten-second fix, not a support ticket. > **Full Version feature — the deeper templates.** Free books use the > Simple template. The Full Version adds a template choice — **Simple**, > **Expanded** (edition notes, website, per-edition ISBNs), **Library of > Congress**, or **None** — with every line editable as free text and > the block set left, centered, or right. If a publisher has handed you > exact copyright wording, this is where it goes in verbatim. ## The contents The Contents row shows the live structure of your book: sections, chapters, front and back matter, growing and reordering as the sidebar changes. It's a real page of the book — anything set to "Show in contents" is here, in order. Page numbers appear at export, because honest page numbers require the whole book to be laid out. The preview says so rather than showing numbers it would have to invent. What the contents *lists* follows sensible rules out of the box; the Full Version's advanced editor adds control over what's listed and how entries are written (numbers, separators, spelled or numeric). # Design, and the Eight Presets Click **Design** and the book fills the screen: controls on the left, a real typeset page on the right. Touch a control and the page repaints. This is the page that prints — same engine, same fonts, same everything — so what you approve here is what you get. ## Presets A preset is a complete, professional book design: typography, page geometry, chapter openings, running heads, scene dividers — every decision made to work together, tuned for a kind of book. Squire ships eight: - **Aldine** — classic fiction. The literary standard: warm oldstyle type (EB Garamond), spelled-out chapter numbers, drop caps, an ornament between scenes. A new book starts here. - **Meridian** — modern nonfiction. Clean and current: Source Serif text with crisp sans headings (Inter), block paragraphs, a big chapter numeral. - **Gaslight** — thriller & suspense. Tight, propulsive lines (Crimson Pro); nothing ornamental slowing the pages down. - **Ember** — romance. Soft and inviting (Lora); the chapter opens on the spelled number alone — "One" — set large. - **Rune** — fantasy & sci-fi. Bookish and a little grand (Alegreya), built at 6×9 because epics are long and a larger trim saves printing cost. - **Harbor** — memoir. Quiet and unhurried (Vollkorn); chapters open on their own titles, no numbers making claims the story doesn't. - **Scholar** — nonfiction with citations. Sober text (Libertinus Serif) that carries note markers and notes pages gracefully. - **Clarion** — large print. Genuinely accessible: Atkinson Hyperlegible at a big size with generous line spacing, at 6×9 only, with wayfinding kept on every page. Click a preset card to dress the whole book in it. Switching costs nothing and loses nothing — your words never change, only their clothes. ## What free design looks like On the free version, a book wears its preset faithfully — these designs are the work of care, and they are yours to ship. Three choices stay open, because they're about *your book* rather than the design: - **Preset** — any of the eight, any time. - **Trim size** — on the edition card: the standard print sizes the preset offers (5×8, 5.25×8, 5.5×8.5, 6×9; Clarion is 6×9 only). - **Chapter number style** — **1**, **One**, or **I**. Also here for every book: the **Book** fields (title, subtitle, author) and the ebook **cover** (its own chapter, later). Everything else in the panel is visible but quietly locked — the app never hides what the Full Version adds, it just keeps it out of reach until unlocked. The one place free design talks about upgrading is a single collapsed note in this panel; open it or ignore it. > **Full Version feature — everything below this line.** The next > chapter is the advanced editor: the full set of design controls the > presets are built from. # The Advanced Editor > **Full Version feature.** On the free version these controls are > visible but locked; your book wears its preset as designed. With the Full Version, a preset stops being an outfit and becomes a starting point. Every control lives in the Design panel, grouped the way a book designer thinks, and every change repaints the real page beside it. Nothing here requires knowing typography — each control shows you its effect, and the preset you started from is always one click back. ## Typography The book's voice. Choose the **body face** from Squire's curated book faces (every family the eight presets are built on), set the **body size**, the **space between lines**, and a separate **chapter-title face** — a sans-serif over a serif text is half of what makes modern nonfiction look modern. ## Chapter openings The most personality per square inch in any book: - **What the opening shows** — number only ("One"), name only ("The Long Way Home"), or both. - **Number style** — numeric, spelled, or roman — and whether a label word rides before it ("Chapter One" vs "One"), and what that word is ("Chapter", "Part", "Letter"…). - **Which part is set large**, the space between them, and the drop from the page's top edge — the white space that makes an opening feel deliberate. - **Drop caps** — on or off, and how many lines deep the letter sits. - If your chapter titles already include their numbers, one switch stops the design from printing a second one. ## Title page Layout control for the page import filled in: sizes and spacing for title, subtitle, and author, and where the block sits on the page. ## Running heads The small lines atop each page. Compose them by **tapping tokens** — page number, book title, chapter title, author — no codes to type, and left-hand and right-hand pages are composed separately (the classic arrangement puts the book on the left page, the chapter on the right). Switches hide the head on chapter openings and section pages, where tradition says the page stays clean. ## Scene dividers What your scene breaks print as, everywhere at once: a quiet gap, asterisks, dots, a rule, or an ornament. ## Notes, footnotes, and contents Books that carry citations or footnotes get sections here for how those print — covered in their own chapter. The **Contents** section controls what the contents page lists and how entries are written. ## When you've made something good Save it as your own preset and every future book can start there — see **Your Own Presets** later in this manual. # Editions and Trim Sizes An edition is one physical form of your book: the paperback PDF, the EPUB, a hardcover, a large-print run. In Squire they are cards in the Design screen, and they all build from the same manuscript — a paperback and an ebook can never disagree about what the book says. ## On the free version Every free book gets **two editions: one print PDF and one EPUB** — exactly what publishing on Amazon KDP asks for. The print edition's **trim size** (the physical page size) is yours to choose from the standard sizes its preset offers: 5×8, 5.25×8, 5.5×8.5, and 6×9 — the sizes print-on-demand services accept without question. ## With the Full Version - **Unlimited editions** — paperback, hardcover, large print, and anything else, from one manuscript. Rename each card what you like. - **Every trim size, including custom** — type the exact dimensions a printer asks for. ## Keeping editions in step — or not By default, every edition wears the book's one design: **one design for all editions**, and the toggle in Design's edition-design section says exactly that. Change the book's design and every edition follows — your formats can never drift apart. This is the answer to "how do I lock my formatting across formats": it's the default, and the toggle is the lock. Turning it off is the Full Version's power move: each edition may state the few things it does *differently* — a hardcover set a point larger, a large-print edition looser between the lines — while everything unstated still follows the book design. You design the book once, then describe the exceptions. # Your Ebook Cover Free, for every book — because an ebook without a cover looks broken on every shelf it sits on. In Design, find the **Cover** area. Drop an image on it, or click to choose one. That's the whole job: the image is **copied into your book's folder** (so the book stays self-contained — move the folder and the cover travels with it) and embedded in your EPUB, where reading apps and store libraries will show it as real cover art. A few honest notes the app will also tell you itself: - **The EPUB uses it; the print PDF doesn't.** Print covers are a separate artifact — Amazon KDP and IngramSpark take the interior PDF and the cover as two uploads, and the cover wrap depends on the final page count and paper. Squire builds your interior; your cover designer (or KDP's cover tool) builds the wrap. - If the image is far from tall-rectangular cover proportions, Squire points it out — stores expect a portrait cover. - If the cover file later goes missing from the folder, you get a friendly note, not a broken build. Swap the cover any time; clearing it just stops embedding it (the copied image stays in your folder until you remove it). # Pictures > **Full Version feature.** On a free copy, pictures stay safely in your > manuscript — imported, kept, never shown or printed. The editor tells > you once, in one grey line; export mentions it once more. Upgrade and > every picture appears exactly where you placed it. Books with pictures — memoirs, how-tos, cookbooks, family histories — are where formatting tools usually give up. Squire treats them as part of the book's design. ## Putting a picture in Click the **image** button in the formatting bar and choose a file. The image is **copied into your book's folder** (self-contained, always) and appears in the chapter. Word documents bring their pictures along at import, already placed where they were in the manuscript. Click a picture to work with it: - **Size** — Small, Medium, or Full width. The typeset page beside you shows exactly what each means in print. - **Caption** — type it under the picture; it prints as a proper figure caption in both formats. ## Print and ebook, each done right This is the part nobody else does: **the print PDF renders your pictures in grayscale; the EPUB keeps them in full color.** A black- and-white print interior is dramatically cheaper to print — color printing can multiply a book's unit cost — while ebook readers get the photographs as shot. One manuscript, each format done the way that format is actually produced. At export, Squire also checks every picture against the size it prints at and warns you if one is too small to print sharply — before the printer tells you with a blurry proof. # Citations and Footnotes > **Full Version feature.** On a free copy, note markers stay in your > text (printed as plain text, never as broken code), and a notes file > is still a page of your book — it appears right after its chapter, > with its own heading, in the sidebar and in both formats. What free > doesn't have is the *machinery*: linked markers, automatic > renumbering, and the formatted notes pages. Upgrade and it all clicks > into place. Squire keeps two kinds of note, side by side in the formatting bar, because they answer different needs: - **A citation** — a *source*. Numbered through the chapter, collected on a notes page. - **A footnote** — an *aside*. It prints at the foot of its own page in print, and opens as a tap-up note in the EPUB. A book can use either, or both at once — when it uses both, footnotes switch to letters so the two streams can't be confused. ## The chore this feature deletes Realize you need a new source between notes 3 and 4, and every marker and every note after it is suddenly wrong. By hand, that's an evening. In Squire, **insert is renumber**: add a citation anywhere and every later marker and note entry moves along by itself, in both the chapter and its notes page. Undo reverses the whole gesture — markers and notes together. Delete works the same way, in reverse. ## Working with citations 1. Give the chapter a **notes page** from its sidebar row — start a fresh one, or attach a notes file your import brought in. It appears as a small **↳ Notes** row under its chapter. 2. Click the **citation** button where a source belongs. The marker appears in the text; the notes page gets a numbered entry waiting for you. 3. Write the source in the notes page. Clicking a marker in the chapter jumps you to its note. ## How they print All of it lives in Design once your book has notes: - **Marker style** — raised numbers, lowered, bracketed, and the combinations, shown as they'll print. - **Where notes go** — collected **at the back** of the book as one notes section, or **beside each chapter** as its own page. A chapter's notes page dresses itself exactly like a chapter opening — if your chapters open "Chapter One", the notes page opens "Chapter One: Notes". - **What to call them** — Notes, References, Bibliography, or any word your genre uses. In the EPUB, markers and notes link both ways — tap a marker to read the note, tap back to return to your place. ## Footnotes Click the **footnote** button; write the aside. Footnotes restart their count with each chapter, and you choose their markers — numbers, letters, or roman — in Design. The same footnote reads identically in print and ebook; only the delivery differs (foot of the page vs. pop-up). ## The proofreader you didn't hire At export, Squire checks every marker against every note: a marker with no note, a note no marker points to, numbers out of order — each is reported as a plain-English warning naming the chapter. When everything lines up, it says that too. And if your manuscript arrived with hand-typed superscript numbers from Word, the export screen offers to link them into real managed citations — one click, never automatic. # Styled Sections > **Full Version feature.** Free books simply don't define section > types, so there's nothing to lock; the toolbar button explains itself > if clicked. Some books have a recurring *kind* of passage: the exercise at the end of every chapter, the "Key Takeaways" box, the interlude in another voice, the recipe card. The amateur way is to format each one by hand and hope they match. The Squire way is to define the kind once and let every instance wear it. ## Defining a type In **Design → Section types**, create one: - **Name it** — "Exercise", "Key Takeaways", "No Man's Land". The name can print as the section's header, and it's what you'll pick from the toolbar. - **Choose its treatment** — how it sets on the page: an **interlude** (set apart, quieter), **boxed** (with a choice of how the box is drawn), **ruled** (lines above and below), or **inset** (pulled in from the margins). - **Dress it** — show or hide the header, set it in small caps, add an ornament. The page beside you shows the treatment live, as always. ## Using it In the editor, the **styled section** button lists your book's types. Pick one, and a marked-off area appears in the chapter — write inside it. Every instance of the type sets identically in the print PDF and the EPUB, and when you adjust the type's design later, every instance follows, throughout the book. Rename a type freely — every section already in the manuscript keeps up. A book that hasn't defined any types yet gets pointed to Design by the toolbar button — defining a look is a design decision, so that's where it lives. # Your Own Presets, and How New Books Start > **Full Version feature.** Free books start from the shipped presets > and the Simple copyright template, with your default author name > applied — which is most of what a first book needs anyway. ## Saving a design of your own When you've shaped a design you're proud of in the advanced editor, save it: name it, describe it, and it joins **Your presets** at the top of the Design panel's preset picker — above the shipped eight, which politely fold away once you have designs of your own. Apply one to any book with a click, exactly like a shipped preset. Refining a design you've saved updates it in place, so "my fiction look, v14" stays one preset rather than fourteen near-duplicates. Two details worth knowing: - Your presets belong to the *app*, so every book on your machine can use them. - Applying one **copies the design into the book**. The book doesn't stay tethered to your preset library — its folder remains fully self-contained, and changing a saved preset later never quietly reformats a finished book. The series author's workflow falls out of this: design book one, save it, and books two through ten start identical — then diverge wherever each needs to. ## How new books start **Settings → New book design** sets the starting point for every book you create from then on: a **default preset** (shipped or your own) and a **default copyright template**. Together with the free-tier defaults above them (author, publisher), a new book arrives already dressed, already attributed — and every one of these is only a starting point, changeable per book afterwards. # Exporting Your Book Click **Export** and Squire builds every edition — the real files, on your machine. A build is something you ask for, never something the app does behind your back. ## What you get Each edition builds in turn (a real book takes real seconds; you'll see each one's progress), into a **build** folder inside your book's folder — outputs always land in the same place, so you always know where your book is. Each edition's **Open** button reveals its file in Finder. - **Print editions** arrive as PDFs, one per edition, at their trim size, with an even page count the way printers expect. The page count is right there on the card — the number you'll give KDP's printing cost calculator. - **The ebook** arrives as an EPUB with your cover embedded, ready for KDP, Apple Books, Kobo, or anywhere else EPUBs go. Preview any edition without leaving the app: print editions as typeset sheets, the EPUB inside a reader frame, pictures shown as each format builds them — grayscale in print, color in the ebook. ## What it tells you The export screen is also where the book gets its final once-over: - **Citation warnings**, if the book has notes — every marker checked against every note, each problem named in plain English. When it's clean: "Every marker and note lines up." - **Friendly notes** about the build itself — a cover image that's gone missing, a picture too small to print sharply. - On the free version, **one folded summary line** counting the Full Version features this book happens to contain. Open it to see what they are; ignore it and it stays folded. The notes say what happened, and your files always keep everything. Fix something and click **Build again** — builds are cheap, and the last one is never precious. ## Sending it to the printer For Amazon KDP: upload the print PDF as your paperback interior and the EPUB as your Kindle ebook. The trims Squire offers are the standard sizes KDP and IngramSpark accept. The print *cover* is the one thing Squire doesn't make today — see the cover chapter. # Settings The **gear** in the top bar opens Settings from any screen. These are preferences about how *you* work, not about any one book — nothing here reformats a book behind your back. - **Appearance** — the app in light or dark. (Your books, of course, print in ink regardless.) - **New books** — a **default author** and **default publisher**, kind to the series writer: every new book and every import starts with them filled in. Changeable per book, always. - **New book design** — the Full Version's authoring defaults: which preset and which copyright template a new book starts on (see *Your Own Presets*). Visible to everyone, quietly locked on free — the app doesn't hide what the Full Version adds. - **Your version** — which version you're on, plainly stated. On the free version this is the one full accounting in the app of what's free forever and what the Full Version adds, with the two buttons that matter: **Get a license**, and **Enter key** for a license you already own. Enter a key here — on whatever screen, whatever book — and the whole app unlocks at once. Below it, your app version, and whether an update is available. # Free or Full? An honest guide, because the free version is not a demo and we'd rather you choose right than choose fast. ## What free actually is The complete book-making path: write (or import) in the full workspace with the live typeset page, structure the book, dress it in any of the eight designer presets at any standard trim, with title page, copyright page, live contents, and a real ebook cover — then export a clean, professional, unwatermarked print PDF and EPUB. Unlimited books, forever, offline. A first-time author can take the free version from manuscript to KDP without touching a wall. ## What the Full Version is **$75, once.** Not a subscription; the version you buy is yours forever, offline, no strings. It adds the deep design control: - The **advanced editor** — fonts, sizes, spacing, chapter openings, drop caps, running heads, title-page layout, scene dividers. - **Unlimited editions** and every trim including custom, with per-edition design differences. - **Pictures**, print-grayscale and ebook-color from one manuscript. - **Citations and footnotes**, with automatic renumbering and real notes pages. - **Styled sections** — define a recurring passage's look once. - **Copyright, fully** — Expanded and Library of Congress templates, free-text editing, alignment. - **Your own presets** and new-book defaults. Major new features beyond that arrive as optional paid upgrades — you pay only if the year's new features are ones you actually want. No upgrade is ever required to keep what you have working. ## Which are you? - **First novel, first book, testing the waters** — free, sincerely. Ship it. If the presets fit your genre (they were designed to), you may never need more. - **A series** — Full pays for itself in workflow: design once, save it as your preset, every sequel starts identical. Free works too — the eight presets apply the same way to every book — but your own saved design is the real "matching set." - **Memoir or nonfiction with photographs** — Full, for the image system alone; grayscale print with a color ebook is the difference between an affordable paperback and a $40 one. - **Academic, history, journalism — anything with sources** — Full. Automatic citation renumbering and validated notes pages are the feature; free treats your notes as ordinary chapters and keeps every marker safe in the text. - **Particular about typography** — you already know which one you are. - **Large print or accessible editions** — start free with Clarion; go Full when you want large print as a *second* edition beside your paperback and ebook (free's two editions are one PDF + one EPUB). - **Workbooks, devotionals, anything with recurring boxes and exercises** — Full, for styled sections. ## The promise either way The fence in Squire gates *presentation*, never your words. A free book keeps its pictures, its markers, its notes files — everything — in files you own. Nothing is watermarked, nothing expires, nothing nags, and upgrading later brings every kept thing to life exactly where you left it. You cannot lose work by choosing free first. # Your License *This chapter arrives with the release version of Squire Editor, once licensing is live. It will cover buying a license, entering your key in **Settings → Your version**, working offline after activation, and moving to a new computer.* # Questions, Honestly Answered **Does it need the internet?** No. Squire runs entirely on your machine — writing, designing, exporting, everything. No account, no cloud, no telemetry. (Buying a license happens in your browser; the app itself stays offline.) **Where is my book, exactly?** A folder you chose, on your disk: one plain text file per chapter, your pictures, your cover, and the finished files in `build` after an export. Copy the folder and you've backed up the book. That folder is readable without Squire, forever. **Can I edit my chapters outside the app?** They're ordinary text files — portable by design. Edit an existing chapter elsewhere while the book is closed in Squire (one editor at a time is the reliable rhythm), and drop *new* files straight into the folder any time: the next time the book opens, Squire notices and sets them in the **left out** drawer for you to place. What the app writes is always clean text, so nothing you do in Squire ever locks a file to it. **Is the free version a trial?** No. No time limit, no watermark, no locked export, no feature that stops working. It's the finished path for a preset-dressed book, free forever — and it's also how you know exactly what you'd be buying, which is why there's no refund dance: try the real thing first. **What happens to my book if I never pay?** Nothing. It exports cleanly today and in ten years. If your manuscript contains Full Version things — pictures, citations — they're kept in your files, quietly, and the app tells you once rather than printing something broken. **What if I stop using Squire entirely?** You keep everything: the folder of text files, the images, every PDF and EPUB you exported. There is nothing to export *out* of Squire, because nothing was ever locked *in*. **Will my paperback and my ebook match?** Yes, by construction — every edition builds from the same manuscript and, unless you deliberately choose otherwise, the same design. They cannot drift. **Can it make my print cover?** Not today — Squire builds interiors and embeds your ebook cover. Print covers (front–spine–back wraps) depend on final page count and paper, and your page count is on the export card, ready for KDP's or IngramSpark's cover templates. A wrap generator is on the roadmap. **Does it work with AI writing tools?** Naturally — that's a design goal. Your chapters are plain text (Markdown), the format every AI assistant speaks. Draft with your assistant, paste into Squire (or import the files at the start), and the app handles what AI can't: making it a book. This manual itself is written to be handed to an assistant — see the note in the Welcome chapter. **Mac only?** Today, yes. Windows and Linux are on the roadmap. **Something's wrong and it isn't in this manual.** Every error the app shows is written to say what happened and what to do next — no codes, no jargon. If one doesn't, or you're stuck, we want to hear about it: support details are on squireeditor.com.