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Ia writer fonts11/23/2023 I continue to be impressed by iA Writer’s blend of an “opinionated” design with support for native platform features that are too often eschewed in favor of proprietary solutions by some third-party apps. There’s nothing iA Writer can do to work around these limitations for now the app tries to make the best out of a fragmented ecosystem of apps that integrate with Files on iOS. However, I can’t help but feel that this situation could be improved by Apple if they required third-party Files extensions to support open-in-place or if, at the very least, the Files app provided some kind of status indicator for external locations that are not compatible with open-in-place. Thankfully, good Files citizens such as iA Writer, Kodex, and Working Copy exist, so I’m able to accomplish the majority of my document-related tasks with these apps. Furthermore, Apple’s Files app doesn’t offer any indication as to which third-party apps support open-in-place and which aren’t compatible with it: I’ve often found myself selecting an external folder from a third-party app in Working Copy or iA Writer only to discover, via an error, that the app didn’t support open-in-place at all. Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive, for instance, won’t let you open folders from other apps such as iA Writer or Working Copy. The biggest downside of open-in-place for folders, as I mentioned last month, is that it’s up to third-party developers to support the feature in their apps, and in my experience most of them don’t. This is not MacStories, but a custom, MacStories-like template in iA Writer. This means you can add any folder from iCloud Drive, repository from Working Copy, or directory from a third-party app that supports open-in-place and make changes to files contained in them directly from iA Writer, without importing or duplicating them. Called ‘Library Locations’, this feature allows iA Writer to open any directory from the Files app – including folders from compatible third-party storage providers – and keep them “synced” as external locations in the app’s library. What I’m really happy to see in iA Writer 5.2 is the same kind of open-in-place integration for folders that Working Copy received last month. I’d love to see EPUB support (with customizable templates) in a future update as well. Still, it’s pretty remarkable that iA Writer can generate Word documents with support for local images, footnotes, tables, and more – so if you’re into that sort of thing, I recommend checking out the new option under the app’s ‘Export’ menu. IA Writer 5.2 comes with a fully rebuilt export option for Microsoft Word (which is also compatible with Pages and Google Docs), but I haven’t used it because, as I mentioned before, we share articles with the MacStories team using GitHub. I still alternate between Quattro and Duo, but I find Quattro to be an overall superior choice for my editing needs.įrom left to right: iA Mono, Duo, and Quattro. With Quattro, iA Writer saves space on smaller screens, which I appreciate when editing a story on the iPhone or iPad in Split View. To my eyes, it retains the legibility of a monospaced font but shares similarities with a proportional one, making everything a bit more compact on the iPhone and iPad. The developers have shared a lot of technical details about the new and redesigned fonts in a blog post (if you’re a type nerd, I recommend going through their explanations), but what I can say is that I instantly fell in love with Quattro. In addition to mono and duospaced fonts (iA Mono and Duo, which were based on IBM Plex), iA Writer now comes with Quattro, an iA-designed font that supports four widths for a cleaner presentation of text, especially on mobile devices. Once again, the folks at iA have focused on improving the app’s typographic options in this version, and the results are fantastic. iA Writer was updated to version 5.2 last week, and I’d like to point out a few welcome enhancements in this release. As a non-native English speaker, I find the latter particularly useful when editing articles. As I wrote in my roundup of must-have iOS apps, I’ve been using iA Writer as my text editor, primarily because of its integration with Working Copy, beautiful typography, and syntax highlighting mode.
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