Binders

A binder is a saved, ordered collection of documents. Think of it as a playlist for your manuscript: you pick which documents belong, put them in the order you want them read, and that arrangement is saved for you to return to. A document can live in several binders at once, and reordering a binder never moves your folders or changes your project’s structure — it is a separate view on top of the same documents.

Binders are useful whenever the same writing needs to appear in more than one arrangement: a Patreon edition, a Gumroad edition and an Amazon edition that share the same chapters but each add their own bonus pages; or a “first act” binder you assemble for a beta reader.

Building a binder

Open Binders from the project sidebar and create one. Add documents with “Add documents”, then drag the cards or rows to set their order. Remove a document from a binder at any time — that only takes it out of the binder; the document itself is untouched.

• Body — the main flow of the binder — your chapters.
• Front matter — pages placed before the body when you publish — a title page or foreword.
• Back matter — pages placed after the body — an author bio, a bonus scene, an afterword.

Four ways to view a binder

• Composer — every document stitched into one scroll, each in its own editor with labelled boundaries, so you can read and edit the binder as a single flow.
• Outline — a compact, numbered list — a scannable table of contents.
• Board — a corkboard of cards, each showing a document’s synopsis, status and length.
• Publish — save publish targets and produce a file for a venue (see below).

Synopses

Each card on the Board can carry a short synopsis — a sentence or two describing what the document contains. You can write it yourself, or use the ✨ button to have Oghmere draft one from the document’s text. A drafted synopsis is only ever a description of what you already wrote; it lands in the box for you to review and save, and Oghmere never rewrites your prose.

Merging documents in Composer view

In Composer view, placing your cursor at the very start of a document and pressing Backspace folds that document up into the one above it — the two become one. Because a document can appear in more than one binder, Oghmere warns you first and names any other binders that document belongs to, so a merge is never a surprise. Every merge is snapshotted before it happens and can be undone from the merge-history panel beside the editor.

Formatting and exporting in Composer view

Composer view has the same formatting toolbar as the single-document editor, pinned at the top of the scroll. It acts on whichever document your cursor is in, so headings, lists, alignment, tables, links, highlights and images all work while you read the binder as one flow — and selecting text brings up the inline formatting menu. The toolbar’s Export menu downloads the whole binder as one file (Word, PDF, Markdown, HTML or plain text), its documents stitched together in binder order.

Publishing a binder

On the Publish tab, add one or more targets. A target is a saved combination of a format (Kindle/EPUB, print PDF, Word, Web or Markdown), an assembly template and an optional theme. Publishing a target assembles the binder — front matter, body, then back matter — through the same publishing engine the rest of the app uses, and drops the finished file in the project’s Publishing history to download. One binder can hold several targets, so “Amazon” can produce a Kindle EPUB and a print PDF from the same chapters.