Writing a Document

This guide covers creating and editing documents in Wafflebase — a word-processor-style editor with real-time collaboration.

Create a Document

1. Open your workspace
2. Click the New dropdown button
3. Select New Document

A blank document opens with a page-style layout, similar to Google Docs.

Basic Editing

Click anywhere on the page to place your cursor and start typing. The editor works like a standard word processor:

• Enter — Split into a new paragraph
• Backspace / Delete — Remove characters
• Arrow keys — Move the cursor
• Text wraps automatically at the page edge

Select Text

• Click and drag to select a range of text
• Double-click to select a word
• Triple-click to select a paragraph
• ⌘+A / Ctrl+A to select all text

Copy, Cut, and Paste

• ⌘+C / Ctrl+C — Copy selected text
• ⌘+X / Ctrl+X — Cut selected text
• ⌘+V / Ctrl+V — Paste text

Paste keeps as much of the original as it can. The editor looks at the clipboard in this order:

1. An image — a screenshot or a picture copied from another app is inserted into the page, even when the clipboard also carries text.
2. Content copied from another Wafflebase document — pasted back with its formatting intact.
3. HTML — text copied from a web page or another word processor keeps its bold, italic, links, headings, and list structure. An HTML <table> becomes a real table.
4. Plain text — a markdown pipe-table (| a | b | with a | --- | separator line) becomes a real table; anything else has each line turned into a separate paragraph.

Press ⌘+Shift+V / Ctrl+Shift+V to paste as plain text and drop all formatting.

TIP

Pasting a table while the cursor is already inside a table fills cells outward from the current one rather than nesting a new table. Rows and columns that would fall outside the existing grid are dropped.

Text Formatting

Use the formatting toolbar at the top or keyboard shortcuts to style your text.

Inline Styles

Style	Toolbar	Shortcut
Bold	B button	⌘+B / Ctrl+B
Italic	I button	⌘+I / Ctrl+I
Underline	U button	⌘+U / Ctrl+U
Strikethrough	—	⌘+Shift+X / Ctrl+Shift+X
Superscript	—	⌘+. / Ctrl+.
Subscript	—	⌘+, / Ctrl+,
Text color	Text color swatch	Pick from the color palette
Highlight color	Highlight swatch	Pick from the color palette
Clear formatting	Clear formatting button	⌘+\ / Ctrl+\

Strikethrough, superscript, and subscript have no toolbar button in the document editor — use the shortcuts.

Font and Spacing

Alongside the style controls, the toolbar carries:

• Font family — a curated list of fonts, with More fonts… to search the full catalog.
• Font size — type a number or use the − / + steppers.
• Line spacing — presets of 1.0, 1.15, 1.5, and 2.0, plus Custom… for any value between 0.5 and 10.

On a phone, font family and size live in the ⋮ overflow menu.

Format Painter

Copy the formatting of one piece of text onto another without retyping it.

• Put the cursor in text whose formatting you want, then click the brush button in the toolbar (or press ⌘+Shift+C / Ctrl+Shift+C). The button stays lit while the formatting is held.
• Select the text to restyle and click the lit button again to apply it. With nothing selected, clicking it again simply drops the copied formatting.
• The keyboard pair is sticky rather than single-use: ⌘+Alt+V / Ctrl+Alt+V applies the held formatting and keeps it, so you can paint several selections in a row.

Paragraph Styles

Headings and Named Styles

The Styles dropdown in the toolbar sets the current block's style — Normal text, Title, Subtitle, and Heading 1 through Heading 6. Headings also have shortcuts: ⌘+Alt+1 … ⌘+Alt+6 / Ctrl+Alt+1 … Ctrl+Alt+6, and ⌘+Alt+0 / Ctrl+Alt+0 to go back to Normal text. Applying the heading level a block already has toggles it back to a paragraph.

Styles are redefinable per document. Format some text the way you want it, then open Styles → Options:

• Update 'Heading 1' to match (named for whichever style you are on) — redefine that style from the text at the cursor. Every block using the style updates.
• Reset 'Heading 1' — put that one style back to its built-in appearance.
• Reset styles — put all of them back.
• Save as my default styles — keep the document's style set on your account, and Use my default styles to apply it to another document.

On a phone the block styles are listed under Styles in the ⋮ overflow menu; the redefine options are desktop only.

Alignment

Use the alignment dropdown in the toolbar, or the shortcuts:

Alignment	Shortcut
Left	⌘+Shift+L / Ctrl+Shift+L
Center	⌘+Shift+E / Ctrl+Shift+E
Right	⌘+Shift+R / Ctrl+Shift+R
Justify	⌘+Shift+J / Ctrl+Shift+J

Lists and Indent

• Numbered list — the list button, or ⌘+Shift+7 / Ctrl+Shift+7.
• Bulleted list — the list button, or ⌘+Shift+8 / Ctrl+Shift+8.
• Tab / Shift+Tab inside a list item nests and un-nests it (up to nine levels). On a plain paragraph, Tab does nothing.
• ⌘+] / ⌘+[ (Ctrl+] / Ctrl+[) increase and decrease the paragraph indent, list or not.

Type Instead of Clicking

A few markdown-style prefixes convert as you type. Type one at the start of an otherwise empty paragraph, then press Space — the space is what fires the conversion:

• # through ###### + Space — Heading 1 to Heading 6
• - or * + Space — bulleted list
• 1. + Space — numbered list

Typing --- on its own line and pressing Enter inserts a horizontal rule, and a http:// or https:// address becomes a clickable link as soon as you type a space after it.

Links

Select some text and press ⌘+K / Ctrl+K — or click the link button in the toolbar, or right-click and choose Add link — then type the address and click Apply.

Put the cursor inside an existing link and a small popover shows the address with buttons to edit or remove it.

Find and Replace

• ⌘+F / Ctrl+F opens the find bar. Type to see the match count, then press Enter (or Shift+Enter) to step forward and back through matches. Esc closes the bar.
• ⌘+H / Ctrl+H opens it with the replace row, which has Replace for the current match and All for every match.
• Two toggles narrow the search: Match case and Use regex.

The replace row is hidden when you only have read access to the document.

Tables

Insert a table from the toolbar to lay out structured content. Click the Table button, drag to pick the grid size, and the table appears at the cursor.

• Tab moves between cells (Shift+Tab moves backward).
• Right-click a cell for row and column operations — insert above/below, insert left/right, delete row/column, and delete the table.
• To combine cells, select a rectangle of them and choose Merge cells from the same menu. Right-clicking a merged cell offers Unmerge cells instead, which puts the original cells back. (There is no way to divide a cell that was never merged.)
• Drag a column or row border to resize.
• Tables can be nested — insert a table inside a cell to build sub-grids.

When a table is taller than the remaining space on a page, its rows split across the page boundary automatically.

Images

Click the Insert image button in the toolbar and choose:

• Upload from computer — pick an image file from your device.
• By URL… — paste the address of an image on the web.

You can also drag an image file straight onto the page, or paste one copied from another app.

Once an image is placed, click it to select it. Eight square handles appear around the edges:

• Drag a corner handle to resize while keeping the aspect ratio (hold Shift to resize freely).
• Drag a side handle to stretch one dimension.
• Delete / Backspace removes it; Esc deselects and puts the cursor back where the image sits.
• Arrow keys leave the image and move the text cursor, as they do in Google Docs: ← places the cursor just before the image, → just after, and ↑ / ↓ move by line. Images sit inline in the text, so there is no free positioning to nudge them to.

Pagination

Documents use a page-based layout similar to a printed document. Pages default to Letter with 1-inch margins, and text flows across pages as you type.

• Long paragraphs and tables break naturally at the page boundary — line splitting keeps headings, table headers, and partial rows in sync with the layout.
• The editor renders one page per "sheet" so you can scroll through the deck of pages exactly as they will print or export.
• Export to PDF preserves the same pagination — what you see on screen matches the exported document.

To end a page early, press ⌘+Enter / Ctrl+Enter to insert a page break. Everything after the cursor moves to the top of the next page.

Page Setup

Click Page setup in the toolbar (on a phone, it is in the ⋮ overflow menu) to change:

• Paper size — Letter, A4, or Legal.
• Orientation — portrait or landscape.
• Margins — top, bottom, left, and right, in inches.

The change applies to the whole document and is a single undo step. You can also drag the margin markers on the ruler to adjust margins directly.

Headers & Footers

Add content that repeats on every page — a title, a date, or a page number.

• Double-click the margin area above the body (header) or below it (footer) to start editing it. Click back into the body, or press Esc, to leave.
• While editing a header or footer, click Insert page number in the toolbar to drop in a number that updates automatically on each page.

A header or footer applies to the whole document, and the toolbar narrows while you edit one — bold, italic, underline, colors, alignment, and the page-number button, but no lists, links, or styles dropdown. You can't insert a table, a page break, or a horizontal rule into a header or footer.

A table that arrives inside a header or footer through DOCX import — a common letterhead pattern — is kept and drawn correctly. It just isn't editable in place: clicking it moves the cursor to the nearest editable paragraph instead.

Spell Check

Misspelled words are underlined with a red squiggle as you type — spell check is on by default. Right-click an underlined word to see suggestions and click one to replace it.

Spell check currently covers English (Latin-script) words in the body text.

The Right-Click Menu

Right-clicking in the body opens one menu that gathers whatever applies where you clicked:

• Spelling suggestions for a word with a red squiggle under it.
• Cut, Copy, and Paste.
• Add link, and Insert comment when text is selected.

Right-clicking inside a table opens the table menu instead — see Tables above.

Comments

Select text and press ⌘+Option+M / Ctrl+Alt+M to start a comment, or right-click and choose Insert comment. A document comment needs a real selection — nothing happens with a bare cursor.

Replies, resolving, mentions, and the comments panel are covered in Collaboration & Sharing.

Undo and Redo

• ⌘+Z / Ctrl+Z — Undo the last action
• ⌘+Shift+Z / Ctrl+Y — Redo

You can also use the undo/redo buttons in the toolbar.

See Every Shortcut

Press ⌘+/ / Ctrl+/ anywhere in the editor to open the shortcuts dialog. The dialog is maintained alongside the editor's bindings rather than derived from them, but it currently matches Keyboard Shortcuts entry for entry. Esc closes it.

What's Next

• Keyboard Shortcuts — Full list of document editor shortcuts
• Collaboration & Sharing — Share and edit documents together in real time