Welcome to Liquid | Author

Please go through this brief document to get the most out of Author since it probably works quite differently to what you are used to.

Read & Edit Modes

Author features distinct modes for reading and editing with different functions available in each mode, as described below. Toggle the modes by clicking the button at the bottom centre of the screen or do the keyboard shortcut cmd /

• Read Mode. Neutral grey tone
• Edit Mode. Warm tone

Read Mode

In Read mode you can use the spacebar to go down a screen–just like on the web–and you can select text and hit the spacebar to have the selected text spoken.

Edit Mode

• To Link to a Website do cmd-k (or ctrl-click) on the text. If you already had copied the link, it will be attached automatically, otherwise you need to type it in manually.
• To Link to a Heading in your document or an image, cmd-shift-k (or ctrl-click) on the text and choose from the list.
• Quick Lookup & Search. To interact with the text in Author and all the text in your macOS applications download the free companion utility ‘Liquid | Flow’ from

the App Store.

It’s worth getting used to since it will allow you to search, look anything up, convert translate and more so quickly that when you use another computer your hands will feel like they are working in slow motion. To use it select text and

• ctrl-click and choose ‘Liquid | Flow’ or use the Liquid | Flow keyboard shortcut you have assigned.
• Quick Command Access Most commands are available through keyboard shortcuts and you can quickly learn any new commands since when you ctrl-click on any text you will see the keyboard shortcuts next to the commands.
• Quick Access to Focus Mode. You can toggle in and out of full screen focus mode with the ESC key.

Instant Outline

To collapse the document to only show the headings in an outline form so that you can quickly get an Outline or Overview and jump around the document, pinch-in on your trackpad. To return to the regular word processing view pinch-out or click on a heading to jump to it.

Dynamic View

Cmd-d or click ‘Word Processing View’ lower right to change into the Dynamic View which you can use for concept mapping and brainstorming etc. To return to the word processing view cmd-d again or click ‘Dynamic View’ lower right.

The first time you do this with your document it will be completely empty but you can now type anything you like, anywhere on the screen: just double-click where you want to type.

If what you type is also in the word processing view it becomes bold. You can double click on the bold text to get a list of all the occurrences of that text in the word processing document which you can then click to jump to or click outside to dismiss.

Any text which is not in the word processing view stays non-bold. Double-click on the text to copy it across to the word processing view and you can keep typing or assign it as a heading etc. When you return to the Dynamic View this text is now bold.

This is just the beginning. The ability to add connections and more will come.

Start with a Brainstorm

If you want to start your document in the Dynamic View for brainstorming, you can create a new document with keyboard shortcut cmd-shift-n and it will open in the Dynamic View.

Find

• If you forget if you have used a certain word or phrase, just select it and ‘Find’ all occurrences of it in the document by doing cmd-f which instantly shows only the sentences in the document which has that text.

This is also very useful when reading a document–you can instantly see the first time a name or term was introduced which is where it would be explained, without losing your place or spending time scrolling. Do cmd-f again to cancel out of this view or click on a sentence to jump to it.

Citations

To cite, select the text you want to assign as a citation to and do keyboard shortcut cmd-t (or ctrl-click on the text and choose Citation). You can then choose to fill in the citation manually for any material or:

• Books. You can choose to search books by Title or Author will fill in all the citation information for you.
• Scholarly Papers. We are working on an extension for searching scholarly papers. If you have specific preferences or suggestions, please email me: frode@liquid.info
• Images. Click on any image you have dragged into Author to add citation information. You can also paste an image into your document which means you can draw on an iPad or take a picture on an iPhone and copy it there and, provided you are near your Mac, simply Paste into Author without any further effort to move the image between devices.
• Web. If you have copied a web address from Safari you can choose ‘Web’ and Author will fill in all the citation information for you.

BibTeX

• . When you download an academic paper the page you download from is likely to have an option to show the

BibTeX citation information. If you click to see this, then select All (cmd-a) and Copy (cmd-c), without having to select the BibTeX text only, you can go to Author, select text and do cmd-t and now you can choose to have the Citation dialog auto-filled-in.

• Video. If you have copied a URL from YouTube, you will additionally have the option to choose ‘From YouTube URL’ and use it for your citation. While watching a YouTube video you can choose to cite the video from an exact time. To do this, while in YouTube, ctrl-click on the video itself and choose ‘Copy URL from Current Location’, switch back to Author, select the text you want to assign the citation to and cmd-t as usual and choose ‘From YouTube’ (or hit ‘enter’). For example here Doug Engelbart talks about demonstrating his early prototypes (Make sure you are in READ mode when you click, in order to view the video):

“…they never thought about just how quickly and flexibly you could do things…”
Engelbart, 2013, video

Export

On export (cmd-e) Author will (optionally):

• Add a Cover Page based on your personal details (stored from last use)
• Format the Citations inside the document with brackets or superscript
• Appends a References/ Bibliography section at the back of the document

Export formats include:

• .pdf Adobe Portable Document Format
• .doc Microsoft Word
• .rtf Rich Text Format
• plain text
• JATS
• .liquid native Author document
• Print to Paper
• Publish to WordPress blog

Preferences

You can change the font for the headings and body text and manage your WordPress accounts in the Preferences (cmd-,).

Support

Thank you for being a pioneer Author user. These are early days and I look forward to hearing from you. Please email me with any questions/comments/bugs/suggestions at frode@liquid.info and of course, if you could Rate Author in the macOS App Store that would be very much appreciated indeed – for a small developer like me, it makes a huge difference!!!

Author is designed and produced by me with coding by Jacob Hazelgrove, based on the philosophy of Doug Engelbart as I have interpreted it, and is supported by Vint Cerf. It is dedicated to my father Ole, and my son Edgar, with grateful thanks to my PhD supervisors Dame Wendy Hall and Les Carr at the University of Southampton.

If you like, you can watch the Video Introduction.

Frode Hegland
London 2019

{4.5}

Leave a Comment