Workspace

Using The Workspace

Write And Format

The center of the workspace is an editable document. The formatting toolbar supports:

• undo and redo;
• bold, italic, and strikethrough text;
• first- and second-level headings;
• bulleted and numbered lists; and
• block quotes.

Formatting applies to the current selection. Selected formatting controls show their active state.

Review Formatting

Choose Formatting review in the toolbar. Select APA 7, MLA 9, or Chicago 17 author-date, then choose Check formatting. Findings are grouped into Structure and Citations.

Use Inspect to move to the current heading or citation. A heading finding may offer an explicit level change; it runs only when you choose it and the target still matches the checked document. Dismiss hides a finding for the current check. Citation findings do not change citation styles.

The review checks structure and style declarations only. It does not certify complete style-manual compliance, save findings, or repair a document automatically.

Use The Toolbar With A Keyboard

Press Tab to enter the formatting toolbar. Use Left Arrow and Right Arrow to move between available controls. Home moves to the first available control and End moves to the last. Disabled controls are skipped.

Navigate The Outline

The Outline panel lists headings from the current document. Choose a heading to move the editor cursor to it. The button beside the DRAFT wordmark opens or closes the panel.

Read Document Details

The Document panel shows live word, character, and heading counts. It also shows the desktop core status:

• Connecting to core while startup is in progress;
• Core v<version> when the connection is ready; or
• a specific unavailable message when startup or status validation fails.

See Troubleshooting for recovery steps.

Work Offline

Choose Online in the header to work offline for the current session. The control changes to Offline. DRAFT then blocks new metadata requests and research links before external work begins, while local editing and formatting review remain available.

Choose Go online to allow external actions again. The setting resets to online when DRAFT restarts. It does not indicate whether the operating system has a connection and does not retry or queue requests.

Protect Your Work

The current interface does not create, open, save, close, or reopen document files. Reloading or closing DRAFT discards editor changes. Keep important text in another saved document until file controls are available.

See Current limitations for the complete current workflow boundary.

Return to Home.