iA / Writer / Support / Preview

Modify the Preview

In Preview you can visualize how your document will appear when exported or printed.

This feature allows you to view rendering in various templates. From Preview, you have the options to adjust the fonts, layout, and background color.

You can open Preview via:

Web & PDF Modes

You can choose between Web mode (rendering HTML) or PDF mode: simply select your desired option from the dropdown.

iA Writer for Windows preview mode toggle

Additional formatting options are available in PDF mode via SettingsTemplates. Learn more about this on our dedicated page: Settings.

If you make changes, you can click the refresh button at the bottom of the PDF preview to see these changes reflected.

You can also select if you'd like to see your Preview side-by-side with the Editor or in full width.

In the Web mode, you can invert the colors to mark the difference between the Editor and Preview, as you can see with the feature image of this article (Editor with a white background, Preview with a dark one).

iA Writer for Windows preview invert colors

By default, Preview will scroll in sync with the Editor. If you wish to decouple and scroll panes independently, you can disable this in FileSettingsEditorSynchronize Scroll.
iA Writer for Windows synchronized scroll

Fonts & Layout

You can modify the font and layout of the document in the Preview thanks to the templates:

Preview determines what Export will look like. In the case of PDF, the currently selected typography in the Preview will be used.

A Little Extra...

If you are familiar with web development, you surely know the inspector tool lets you see parts of the code rendered by the page, such as HTML and CSS. You can enable the Web Inspector tool in the Preview, if you'd like to see what your document looks like, under the hood.

On Windows, you can enable the Chromium inspector by using the keyboard shortcut: Ctrl JiA Writer for Windows web inspector

More about that in this quick video tutorial:

Preview