Formatting in the editor
8 May 2026
A manuscript you send to an agent or publisher is mostly just text. Things like images are added much later, by the typesetter. So Waxcap™'s editor gives you the formatting a manuscript uses, and each export handles every piece of it the way that format expects. For example, footnotes are gathered up as endnotes, and bold is set as plain text in a submission manuscript.
What the editor has
This is the full set: bold, italic, strikethrough, headings at three levels, bulleted and numbered lists, blockquotes for an epigraph, links, footnotes, inline code, and a horizontal rule for a scene break. Each one has a keyboard shortcut, so you never need to type a symbol yourself.
Chapters don't need formatting at all. When you export, each document's name becomes its chapter heading, and if you switch it on, each folder gets a divider page of its own, the way a part does in a published novel.
Annotations and highlights sit alongside the formatting as marks for yourself, and exports take them off. They have a note of their own.
Tables and images
The editor doesn't use tables, images, raw HTML or maths notation. Tables rarely appear in a novel, and an agent wouldn't expect to find images in a manuscript.
How the words are stored is a separate subject, covered in Why plain markdown?