On this page
  1. Which to reach for
  2. The toolbar's Copy menu
  3. When they are off
  4. What a downloaded file is called

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Your first export

Export opens a sheet of six formats.

This page is the panes docked, the editor closed, no prompter running.

  1. Press Export in the toolbar.
  2. Read the lines above the buttons.
  3. Press a format: Copy, Google Docs, PDF, DOCX, Markdown or HTML.

PDF and DOCX are on Team and up and Google Docs on Business and up, and a workspace created before they became part of a plan keeps all three; where the plan lacks one, the button names the plan, and Exporting has what pressing it shows.

The sheet reports what happened — Copied, Sent to the print dialog, Downloaded acme-integration-overview.docx — and Export again as… goes back to the six. The format that last worked is the one pressed and focused when the sheet opens.

Exporting is the page for the six: what the sheet tells you first, what each format carries, and where they differ on code and diagrams.

Which to reach for

Pasting into something already open is Copy. Sending a file to a customer is DOCX, or PDF through the print dialog. Handing the document to somebody who will keep editing it is Google Docs or DOCX. Putting the text into a repository or a ticket is Markdown.

The toolbar's Copy menu

A list of its own, in this order: Copy (Rich HTML) (⌘⇧K), Print / Save as PDF, Download Word (.docx), Google Docs (Paste ⌘V), Copy for Email and Copy as Markdown (⌘⇧C). The last two are clipboard renderings the sheet does not carry.

Where the plan does not include PDF, DOCX or Google Docs, the matching item stays in the menu, does nothing, and shows the line the Export sheet shows, for example PDF is on Team. Copy, Markdown and HTML carry every byte of this document. The other three items are never limited by plan.

When they are off

While the editor is open or the canvas is empty, each control carries its reason: Close the editor to export. or Nothing to export yet. on Export, Close the editor to copy the document. or Nothing to copy yet. on Copy. A click, ⏎, Space, ↓ or ↑ then does nothing, so the Copy menu stays closed.

What a downloaded file is called

The title, lowercased, with every run of anything that is not an ASCII letter or digit turned into a single hyphen and the leading and trailing hyphens trimmed — so accented letters become hyphens too. A title with no letter or digit left in it downloads as document. A new document is titled Untitled document, so it downloads as untitled-document; a document that inserting a template creates takes the template's title instead.

File formats is the generated list of what the product reads and writes.