Editing long text in the Layout by Zaweba story editor
The story editor in Layout by Zaweba shows a story as plain text with its paragraph style names, for quick editing and checking away from the layout.
Story editor is a different way of looking at text in Layout by Zaweba. Instead of the words laid out in frames across pages, with all their fonts, columns and pictures, it shows the story as plain text, with the name of each paragraph's style beside it. Same words, none of the layout.
It may seem a step backwards. For some jobs, it is exactly what you want.
Why plain text helps
On a laid out page, text is broken across columns and frames, wrapped around pictures and set in sizes chosen for print. Reading a long story that way, especially one that jumps between pages, is slow. The story editor puts the whole story in one continuous view, so you read it from top to bottom without chasing it through the document.
It also strips out distraction. When the task is the words themselves, correcting a typo, rewriting a sentence or checking the flow of an argument, the design gets in the way. Plain text keeps your attention on the writing.
Paragraph style names as a check
Seeing the style name beside each paragraph turns the story editor into a checking tool. Run your eye down the names and you can see straight away whether every heading uses the heading style, whether body paragraphs are all the body style, and whether a paragraph has slipped into the wrong one.
That's hard to spot on the page, where two styles can look nearly identical. A subhead set in the body style by mistake, or a quote that missed its style, stands out in the story editor's list.
Getting styles right matters beyond the look. Styles drive contents lists, running headers from text variables, and EPUB structure, so a wrongly styled heading can go missing from the contents.
Jobs it suits
Proofreading a long feature or a chapter before it goes to an editor. Making edits an editor has sent back, working through a marked up copy line by line. Checking style use across a long document after copy has been pasted in from elsewhere.
Getting the most from it
Keep the layout in view while you edit, if your screen allows. Changes in the story editor are changes to the story, so they reflow in the frames, and seeing both helps you judge whether an edit has knocked a line onto the next page.
Use it alongside find/change and spell check. Story editor is for reading and fixing; find/change is for systematic replacements; spell check catches the slips both can miss.
Story editor display has its own section in Preferences, so its look can be adjusted separately from the layout.
Story editor slips
Forgetting that edits reflow the layout is the main one. Cutting a sentence in the story editor can pull text back from the next page and change line breaks you'd tuned by hand.
Another is trying to judge typography there. Line breaks, hyphenation and spacing only show on the page.
For long text work in Layout by Zaweba, the story editor is the quiet place where the words get attention before the design takes over again.
