Exporting a book

Export turns the story into a file you can read, print, send or publish elsewhere. Unlike a backup it contains only the text, as a finished book.

Only the active branch is exported - the same parts the story editor shows. To export another version of the story, switch to that branch first.

Exporting

1. Open the book and go to the Story tab.

2. Open the settings menu (⚙) in the bottom bar and choose Export story.

3. Fill in the dialog and choose Export.

4. Marginalia collects the parts of the branch and writes the file, which takes a moment for a long book. A progress bar shows how far it is.

5. When the file is ready, a dialog offers it for download. Choose the Download button to save it.

Field
Format	The file type, see below.
Print style	Only for the formats that have fonts and colors (HTML, Word, PDF, EPUB). The look of the text, chosen from the styles for exports: the application brings one for each of these formats, HTML page, E-book (EPUB), PDF book and Word document, which are the looks the exports always had and are chosen by themselves when you pick the format, and you can make your own, see Print styles. The style you chose for the format in Settings → Exports is the one preselected.
File name	Name of the downloaded file without the extension, which Marginalia adds. Starts as the name of the book.
Book title	The title in the file (title page and file properties). Starts as the name of the book; changing it doesn't rename the book.
Author	Starts as your full name from your account. Empty means no author.
From message, To message	Which parts to export. Parts are counted from 1 in the order of the story, parts without text are not counted. Leave To message empty to export to the end.
Include title page	Starts the file with a first page holding the title and the author.

Formats

Format
Plain text (.txt)	Just the text in UTF-8. Formatting such as italics is dropped, paragraphs are separated by an empty line.
Markdown (.md)	The text as it is written in the story, for editors such as Obsidian or Typora, a static site or a repository. Emphasis, headings, quotes, lists, code blocks and scene breaks stay Markdown. Raw HTML in the text is kept as typed, the Markdown reader decides whether to show it.
HTML (.html)	One page with a book-like style included, so it looks the same in every browser. It can be printed and has no external files.
Word document (.docx)	Opens in Word, LibreOffice and similar programs. Justified text, with the title and author set in the file properties.
PDF (.pdf)	A5 pages with embedded fonts that cover Latin, Greek and Cyrillic text.
EPUB (.epub)	An e-book for e-readers and reading apps. Long books are split into several files inside the EPUB so readers stay fast.
HTML for Archive of Our Own (.html)	For posting on AO3, see below.
Markdown with front matter (.md)	For static site generators, see below.
SillyTavern chat (.jsonl)	The story as a chat, see below.
Obsidian vault (.zip)	The chapters and the lorebook as linked notes, see below.

The text of the parts is Markdown. Emphasis, headings, quotes, lists, code blocks and scene breaks (---) are kept in every format that can show them. Raw HTML in the text is shown as text, never run.

Images

Images of the parts are placed where their position says (after the text unless you chose another place), with their captions, in the width you gave them (a percent of the width of the text; without a width the picture keeps its size, scaled down to the page). Not every format can put text beside a picture:

Format
HTML, EPUB	Embedded (in the page, or as files of the book). The text flows around the pictures at the left or the right; a picture in the middle is between two columns of text. On a narrow screen they go above the text, and a reader without columns (some e-readers) shows the first text, the picture and the rest one under the other. Pictures next to each other in a place stand in a row.
Word document	The picture the text flows around is in a small table that Word places at the side or in the middle, and Word wraps the text around it (on both sides for the middle, line by line); the caption is under the picture. Pictures with a width that fit next to each other are a row of a table.
PDF	The text flows around the pictures at the side, the caption is drawn under the picture. A picture in the middle is between two columns of left aligned text (a band that does not fit at the end of a page starts on the next one). Pictures with a width that fit next to each other are a row. A picture that is too tall for the rest of the page goes to the next page.
Markdown	Embedded in the file as  images with the caption in italics under them, so it is still one file. The position among the text is kept; the width and the flowing text are not. Not every reader shows embedded images (GitHub does not), and a book with many images has very long lines, so attach images to the parts only when you want them in a Markdown export.
Plain text	Marked with [Image] or [Image: caption] at their place in the text.
HTML for Archive of Our Own	Marked with [Image: caption]: AO3 takes images only from links.
Obsidian vault	Saved in the Attachments folder of the vault and embedded in the note of their chapter at their place, with the caption in italics.
SillyTavern chat	Left out, a chat has only text.

For other tools

These formats are made for a tool that reads them, not for reading. They do not have the Print style choice.

HTML for Archive of Our Own. AO3 asks for the title, the author and the chapter titles in fields of its own and drops what it does not know (style blocks, the page around the text, images that are not links), so the file has no title page. Open it in a browser to see the work as the paste will look. Every chapter (a part that starts with a heading and the parts after it up to the next heading) has its title above two comments, BEGIN chapter N and END chapter N: copy what is between them into the HTML editor of the chapter on AO3 and the title into its title field. The text is clean HTML without line breaks between the tags, because AO3 turns each line break into a <br>.

Markdown with front matter. The same Markdown as the Markdown format, but the file starts with a YAML block (title, author, lang, date of the export) that Jekyll, Hugo, Eleventy and similar generators read, instead of a title page; Include title page has no effect on it. The block is a template you can change in Settings → Exports (, , , ; the title and the author are already escaped for use inside double quotes).

SillyTavern chat. A JSON Lines file that the chat import of SillyTavern reads: the character is named after the book and you are the author. Each part of the story is a message of the character (the text), and when the part was written with instructions they come before it as your message. The reasoning of the model, if the part has any, is kept as the reasoning of the message. The title page does not apply.

Obsidian vault. A ZIP with a folder named after the book; unpack it and open the folder as a vault. It has a note named after the book (the front matter, the title page and the lists of the chapters and of the lore), a note for each chapter in Chapters (with links to the previous and next chapter), a note for each enabled entry of the lorebook of the book and of its sub lorebooks in Lore/<lorebook> (the tags of the entry are the tags of the note, its comment is a callout), and the images in Attachments. In every note the first mention of the name of an entry (a name of at least three characters, whole words, as spelled) is a link to its note, so the graph view shows which entry is in which chapter. A part with a heading starts a chapter; parts before the first heading are the note Beginning (or Story when the book has no headings). The front matter and the title page are templates you can change in Settings → Exports.

Print styles

The export uses the text styles of Settings → Styles that are marked For exports. Styles are either for books (the story and the reader) or for exports: the Change Styles For Text menu and the reader show only the first kind, the export dialog only the second. The four built-in ones are the looks of the formats; Duplicate one (or a book style, and tick For exports) to make your own, for example the Book style on paper. The style is worked out for paper: colors that depend on the theme of the application (the light text of the dark theme) become the dark ones for a white page.

Format	What the style gives
HTML	The whole stylesheet of the style, including the custom CSS, drop caps, the text width and the background; the title page and the contents keep the look of the format.
EPUB	The stylesheet of the style without the custom CSS (e-readers do not all understand it; some readers also set their own fonts and sizes).
PDF	The font family (serif, sans or monospace of the embedded fonts, chosen from the font stack), size, line height, alignment, the space between paragraphs, the first line indent, the background color of the page (the whole page, the title page included), the colors of the text, italic, bold, quotes, headings and the scene break, the alignment and size of headings and the symbol of the scene break.
Word document	The same as the PDF, with the font named in the style (Word shows its own when the computer lacks it) instead of the embedded ones. The background is the color of the page: Word shows it on the screen, but does not print it unless Print background colors and images is on in its print options.

Drop caps, the custom CSS (PDF, Word, EPUB), small capitals of headings and the text width are not made in the PDF and Word files.

Title page template

The title page is written from a template, one for every format. Change it in Settings → Exports: the template is Markdown with (the book title of the dialog) and, for example ## and a line written by . The default is the title as a heading and the author in italics.

Table of contents

When the text contains chapters, the file gets a table of contents after the title page. A chapter is a part of the story that contains a Markdown heading (a line starting with #, e.g. # Chapter 3: The Harbour) - the same rule the Chapter Marker plugin uses in the story sidebar. The first heading of a part is its title, parts without a heading belong to the chapter before them. A story without any heading has no table of contents.

In PDF, Word and EPUB every chapter starts on a new page. The title page and the table of contents are pages of their own as well.

The entries are links to the chapters:

Format
HTML	Links to the chapters of the page.
PDF	Clickable entries with the page of the chapter, and the chapters are also in the outline (bookmarks) your PDF reader shows next to the pages.
EPUB	The table of contents of the reader, which is also a page of the book after the title page.
Word document (.docx)	Clickable entries with the page of the chapter. Word asks to update the fields when it opens the file, answer Yes to fill in the page numbers (LibreOffice fills them in on its own). It is a list of links and not a Word table of contents field.
Markdown	No table of contents. The chapter headings stay in the text, and most Markdown editors build an outline from them.
Plain text	No table of contents.

Page numbers

The PDF and Word files have the page number in the footer of every page except the title page. The number is the position of the page in the file, so the title page is page 1 and the first page after it is page 2. The other formats have no pages of their own.

The title page

With Include title page, the file starts with the book title and the author on a page of their own. The page is made from a built-in template (DEFAULT_EXPORT_HEADER_TEMPLATE), which isn't editable in the application yet.

Good to know

• The export is a snapshot of the branch when you choose Export. Parts generated or edited afterwards are not in the file.

• The exported file is kept only until you close the download dialog. Export again if you need it later.

• Summaries, lorebooks, instructions and the model's reasoning are not exported, only the text and the images of the parts. To save all of it, make a backup.