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1.0 Getting Started

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Frédéric Clavert edited this page Jul 24, 2026 · 3 revisions

Getting Started — your first project

This page bridges installation and writing: it assumes ClioDeck is installed, and takes you to your first paragraph.

1. What you need before writing

For You need
Writing, footnotes, citations, export to Word Nothing beyond ClioDeck
Asking the assistant questions, indexing your PDFs Ollama running locally, or a cloud provider API key
Exporting to PDF Pandoc and a LaTeX distribution

You can write and export to Word without ever setting up an AI provider. See Installation.

2. Create a project

Click New project in the left panel, then choose a project type. The type is not cosmetic: it decides how your text is stored and exported.

Type Your text lives in Choose it for
Article a single document.md a paper, a chapter contribution, anything of one piece
Book one file per chapter, under chapters/ a monograph, a thesis, anything you will navigate by chapter
Presentation a single slides.md a talk, a seminar, a conference paper

Every article and book project is also created with:

  • abstract.md — your summary (used as the abstract at export, and as the back-cover text of a book);
  • context.md — where you describe your subject, period, corpus and conventions. This file is sent to the assistant at the start of every conversation, so it is worth a few honest sentences. Left untouched, it sends nothing.

Changing project type later is not automatic. If you begin an article and it grows into a book, create a book project and attach your existing file as a chapter — see Books and Chapters.

3. Write

The editor renders your markdown as you type; the syntax of whatever your cursor is inside reappears so you can edit it. Your file is never rewritten behind your back.

The essentials:

You want Do this
Bold / italic Cmd/Ctrl+B · Cmd/Ctrl+I
A citation Type @ and pick from your bibliography, or Cmd/Ctrl+'
A footnote Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+F
To save Cmd/Ctrl+S — auto-save also runs a few seconds after you stop typing

Full details in The Editor.

4. Bring in your bibliography

Citations autocomplete from your bibliography, so import it early:

A citation key that is not in your bibliography is underlined but never blocks you; Check citations (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+C) lists what is missing.

5. Your first chapter (book projects)

  1. In the chapter panel, click Add a chapter
  2. Give it a title — the # heading of the file is that title
  3. Write; use ## for sections inside the chapter
  4. Add the next chapter, and reorder with Move up / Move down

The panel also shows an Outline of each chapter's headings, and a search across the whole manuscript.

6. Export

Cmd/Ctrl+E, or the Export tab. PDF needs Pandoc and LaTeX; Word needs nothing extra. In a book, you can export the whole manuscript or just the chapter you are working on.

If you're exporting a book to Word with a bibliography attached, see the warning on the Word Templates guide — that export path currently produces an empty document in the common case (issue #19). PDF export is unaffected.

See the Export Guide.

Where to go next

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