Authorship Mac

iA Writer for Mac helps you to distinguish between Human generated text and Other sources (such as AI).

When the feature is enabled you can quickly see the difference in a document:

• Human authors text is subtly dimmed and underlined.
  
• Other (AI in example) is dimmed.

When you make edits to text as the primary author, your text remains in full focus and you can clearly see where your text ends and externally sourced content starts.

Note: Authorship does not modify your content in anyway and your text is not sent to a server to detect authors. Everything happens locally on your device: Your data is yours, in compliance with our Privacy Policy.

Enable or Disable Authors

You can always mark a selection or paste as any type of author into a document. To see the distinction in the Editor you need to enable the appropriate Editor settings.

You can enable Authorship in one of three ways:

Settings pane	Editor → Authors:
Focus Menu	Show Authors
Editor’s Title Bar	Select the Focus dropdown
Keyboard shortcut	⇧ ⌘ A

Pasting

Paste As

Writer relies on you defining the authorship by yourself. Pasting content from an external source with Authorship attribution is easy.

With some text on clipboard:

Right-Click	Right-click in Editor and select Authors → {desired author} → Paste
Authors Menu	Navigate to menu bar Authors → {desired author} → Paste as {desired author}
Keyboard Shortcut	Paste content as the top secondary author using the keyboard shortcut: ⇧ ⌘ V

💡 You can map any menu item including Authors functions. To learn more please see the support article for Shortcuts

Pasting Between Existing Documents

Sometimes you may want to copy/move text from one document to another/ a new one. If your selected text contains author data, iA Writer will give you the option to Paste With Annotations or Paste:

Paste With Annotations	Authorship information is retained and added at the end of the of the receiving document.
Paste	Text is pasted without Authorship data.

Marking As

When editing documents you can attribute existing text to a specific author. This is helpful not only for your own documents but also for shared/collaborative documents when you wish to clearly discern between authors.

After selecting a range or ranges of text:

Right-Click	Right-click in Editor and select Authors → {desired author} → Mark Selection
Authors Menu	navigate to menu bar Authors → {desired author} → Mark Selection as {desired author}

Keyboard Shortcuts

By default the second author (immediately following you, the primary author) is mapped to the ⇧ ⌘ V keyboard shortcut for pasting.

Since the list of Authors is flexible and unique to each user, you can map your own Paste as … and Mark selection as … to any unreserved shortcut. Here’s how:

1. Navigate to desired Authors menu option
2. Open macOS Settings
3. Search: keyboard shortcuts
4. Select App Shortcuts
5. Click ＋ and select iA Writer from the list of apps
6. In            enter the item exactly as it appears in iA Writer’s Authors menu
7. Click Done

Managing Authors

Globally

Managing a list of authors is easy in Writer. You can access this function in: Settings → Authors

In Authors settings you can:

• Add or remove an author
• Edit an existing author’s details
• Reorder added authors

Add or Remove an Author

Click on the ＋ to add a new author. You’ll be prompted to add a Name and can also add an identifier (like website, or email address). User the Kind dropdown to designate your author as Human or Other (i.e. Websource, AI, etc.).

When you are finished press return to save details.

To remove an existing author, select the author in the list and click on the －. Note the removing the author does not remove authorship assigned in existing documents. You can always re-add an author following steps in the section above.

💡 Authors sync to Writer on other devices with iCloud. If you add an author on one device, you’ll see it added everywhere, automatically.

Edit Author Details

Name	Required. Name of the author. Paste and Mark menu options use this name.
Identifier	Optional identifier for author. Can be used to assign a website, email, etc. Can also be used to differentiate authors with same name.
Kind	Author type. Designate Human or Other for author.

Reorder Authors

You can reorder authors to change how they appear in menu options. Simply click (hold) and drag authors into desired order. The top author immediately following the primary author is automatically assigned to the Paste As shortcut: ⇧ ⌘ V

In a Document

You can quickly access and manage the list of authors for any active document. With the document open in Editor navigate to Authors → Edit Authorship…:

This will present a popup with the list of authors for the document as well as a character count for each author.

You can also:

Enable	Attributes subsequently typed text to you and allows for pasting or marking sections with authorship.
Disable	Removes all authorship data from the file.

In a document with existing authors you can select an author and right-click or press ••• :

Edit	Modify information such as name, identifies and kind for selected author.
Replace	Allows you to transfer authorship to another author.
Delete	Removes the author and associated data from file. Note: This does not remove Author from the app Settings.

Annotated Files

You can quickly distinguish between files including authorship data and those without. When a file has authorship annotations added, the file icon shows a blue Ⓐ.

iA Writer stores author related metadata at the end of a file. This metadata is tucked out of view in Writer’s editor, but is visible when the file is opened in other text editors/apps.

Export

iA Writer automatically strips author metadata on export to Markdown, HTML, PDF and MS Word.

Sharing

When sharing annotated files via macOS sharing options (AirDrop, email, from Finder, etc.), all file information including author metadata is shared.

Authorship