iA Writer Templates

January 5, 2023 · View on GitHub

Preview, create PDFs, and print documents in your own style with templates in iA Writer.

Templates are built with web pages. You can use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to lay out your documents. If you know how to make a web site, you can easily make an iA Writer template.

iA Writer templates are bundles: directories that group template files together. Bundles are natively supported by macOS and iOS. To browse template contents, right-click it in Finder and choose “Show Bundle Contents”.

Example.iatemplate/
    Contents/
        Info.plist
        Resources/
            document.html
            title.html
            header.html
            footer.html
            style.css

Installing Templates

macOS

Double-click a template in Finder
Drag to iA Writer icon in Dock
Add in Preferences → Templates

Note: Template bundles are copied when installed. Any changes made to the original bundle will not be visible in iA Writer. You may modify the installed bundles. To find an installed bundle, right-click one in Preferences and select “Show in Finder”.

iOS

iOS supports adding template bundles, as well as ZIP archives, with one template per archive.

Send via AirDrop
“Copy to iA Writer” from Safari, Mail, iCloud Drive, or another sync service

Windows (v. 1.2+)

Download the template then, from iA Writer's menu choose: File → Install Template → Select 'TemplateName.iatemplate.zip' file.

HTML Files

iA Writer templates use separate HTML files for laying out the title page, document text, headers, and footers.

Template Properties

Template pages and other properties are defined in Info.plist. We recommend starting with our example bundle if you’ve never dealt with property list files before. XML property list files can be edited in any text editor.

Key	Value	Presence	Description
`CFBundleName`	String	Required	Template name shown in iA Writer.
`CFBundleIdentifier`	String	Required	Uniquely identifies¹ a template.
`IATemplateDocumentFile`	String²	Required	Lays out document text.
`IATemplateTitleFile`	String²	Optional	Lays out a title page on export.
`IATemplateHeaderFile`	String²	Optional	Draws at the top of each document page on export.
`IATemplateFooterFile`	String²	Optional	Draws at the bottom of each document page on export.
`IATemplateHeaderHeight`	Number	Optional	Header height, in CSS points (≤400).
`IATemplateFooterHeight`	Number	Optional	Footer height, in CSS points (≤400).
`IATemplateDescription`	String	Recommended	A sentence that describes your template.
`IATemplateAuthor`	String	Recommended	A person (or a company) who created the template.
`IATemplateAuthorURL`	String	Recommended	A link to template’s author.
`IATemplateSuportsSmartTables`	Boolean	Optional	Whether to process Smart Tables. Defaults to YES if absent.
`IATemplateSupportsMath`	Boolean	Optional	Whether to process TeX math expressions into MathML. Defaults to YES if absent.
`IATemplateTitleUsesHeaderAndFooterHeight`	Boolean	Optional	When set to NO changes header and footer height on title page to 0. Defaults to YES if absent.

iA Writer uses the bundle identifier to associate templates with documents. Each template must have a unique identifier. The identifier must contain only alphanumeric (A-Z, a-z, 0-9), hyphen (-), and period (.) characters. The string should be in reverse-DNS format. For example, if your company’s domain is example.com you could assign the string com.example.template as the bundle identifier.
HTML file name, without path extension. The actual files themselves must have an html extension.

Content

iA Writer applies content to HTML using JavaScript. It replaces innerHTML on elements with several predefined data attributes.

For example, <span data-date></span> becomes <span data-date>June 22, 2016</span> when a page is loaded for export.

iA Writer dispatches an ia-writer-change event to elements when it updates them with new content.

Document

The document page lays out the text from the editor in Preview, printed documents, and PDFs.

Attribute	Description
`data-document`	Document text as HTML.

iA Writer uses MultiMarkdown (with a few additions) to convert Markdown to HTML. Markup.txt contains some of the most commonly used markup in iA Writer. Markup.html is the resulting HTML for data-document.

Title page, header, and footer are used only in in printed documents and PDFs.

Attribute	Description
`data-page-count`	Total page count of the exported document.
`data-page-number`	Current page number.¹

data-page-number is not available in title pages. They do not have a page number to keep numbering the same whether or not you include the title page during export.

All Pages

Attribute	Description
`data-title`	Document title, taken from document file name.
`data-author`	Document author, if specified in Preferences.
`data-date`	Current date. You can specify date format¹ in the attribute value: `data-date="MMMM yyyy"`. Date format patterns are described in Unicode Technical Standard #35. On Windows, Microsoft standards are used.

data-date output may not contain exactly those components given in the attribute value, but may—for example—have locale-specific adjustments applied: yMMMMd may become MMMM d, y in the US, and d MMMM y in the UK.

Preview

We recommend all template authors spend a few minutes to make their templates look great in Preview by adding support for night mode, as well as system-wide font size on iOS.

iA Writer uses the class attribute of the <html> element for environment data. Avoid adding custom classes to this element, because they will be replaced when a template is loaded.

Class	Description
`night-mode`	Night mode is active.¹
`ios`	Preview on iOS.²
`mac`	Preview on macOS.

Note that users may invert night mode in Preferences on macOS.
We strongly recommend using standard media queries to make your templates responsive. However, sometimes it’s important to differentiate between iOS and macOS. For example, default templates have a slightly different color scheme on each platform.

Developing Templates

To fully reload the currently visible template in Preview on macOS, press Shift Command R.

To enable Web Inspector in Preview, paste the following command into Terminal.

defaults write pro.writer.mac WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true

On Windows, you can enable the Chromium inspector by using Ctrl J.

Vertical Margins

Avoid vertical margins and padding for the document page.

iA Writer will adjust the <html> element padding in Preview to match Editor
Top and bottom margins for printing and PDF export are instead controlled by header and footer height in Info.plist

iA Writer adjusts Preview toolbar colors to match the currently visible template on macOS. Be sure to set color and background-color on the <html> element.

Font Size on iOS

iA Writer supports system-wide font size on iOS. Users can adjust the font size in Settings > Display & Brightness > Font Size. Most templates should adjust font size for this setting.

Class	Description
`content-size-xs`	An extra small font.
`content-size-s`	A small font.
`content-size-m`	A medium-sized font.
`content-size-l`	Default value. A large font.
`content-size-xl`	An extra large font.
`content-size-xxl`	An increasingly large font.
`content-size-xxxl`	The largest font option.

Note that some users may enable accessibility sizes in Settings > General > Accessibility > Larger Text.

Class
`content-size-accessibility-m`
`content-size-accessibility-l`
`content-size-accessibility-xl`
`content-size-accessibility-xxl`
`content-size-accessibility-xxxl`