Preview
If you want to see what your formatted text looks like, enable the Preview. It will open a panel either side-by-side with the Editor, or in full screen, as you wish.
Reveal and Conceal Preview
You can open and close Preview in 4 different ways:
| Open Preview | Close Preview |
|---|---|
| With your mouse cursor over the right side of the editor, use a swipe to the left gesture (two-finger swipe on trackpads) | With your mouse cursor over the right side of the editor, use a swipe to the right gesture (two-finger swipe on trackpads) |
| Click the “play” button in the top-right of the title bar | Same |
| From the Menu, select View → Show Preview | From the Menu, select View → Hide Preview |
| Use the keyboard shortcut ⌘R | Same |
Modify the rendering of Preview
Preview can appear as half of the screen side-by-side with the Editor or in full screen. At full width, you can hide the Editor completely for an ideal reading environment, while half-width is often used by writers who want to keep track of the formatting as they go.
You can resize the Preview:
– via the menu View → Preview Width → Split | Full
– via the Toolbar (right side)
You can choose between Web or PDF view. You have more formatting options available for PDF via Preferences → Templates.
In the Web view, you can invert the colors to mark the difference between the Editor and Preview.
Finally, you can modify the font and layout of the document in the Preview thanks to templates:
– via the Toolbar (middle)
– in the Menu select View → Templates.
Export
You can export your document by using the menu: File → Export…. Here you can choose the manner of export.
Preview determines what Export will look like. In the case of PDF, the currently selected typography in the Preview will be used.
You can change the appearance of your export by selecting another template.
To learn more about the different export options, please check our dedicated page for macOS: Import, Export, Share.
A little extra
If you are familiar with web development, you surely know the inspector tool lets you see parts of the code rendered by the page, such as HTML and CSS. You can enable the Web Inspector tool in the Preview, in case you wanted to know what’s your document like, under the hood.
To enable Web Inspector in Preview, paste the following command into Terminal:
defaults write pro.writer.mac WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true