Getting started

This is the page you get when you press ⌘? with nothing open.

CaseLeaf reads and marks PDF documents. It treats them with more care than an ordinary reader does: a mark stays a mark until you make it permanent, a black-out removes what it covers rather than painting over it, and the document's own history travels inside the file. The front page says more about what that means. This page is about the first few minutes.

Getting a document in

New from Images… is there for a folder of screenshots or photographed pages. They become one document, which can then be cropped to a single rectangle and saved as a PDF.

The window

The page is in the middle. Down the left is the panel of page thumbnails (⌘1), which also holds the contents, what a search found, and the same hits counted by page. Down the right is the panel of lists (⌘2): marks, history, bookmarks, and the rest. The tool strip down the left edge and the bars along the top hold the tools and buttons; every button says what it does when you rest the pointer on it.

Several documents open as tabs in one window, and a tab dragged to an edge of the window puts that document beside the others. See Reading a document and Tabs and panes.

Saving, and what is already written

Save writes this document back to its own file. Much of the time it has very little left to do, because a document is written as you mark it: about a second after you stop, whatever you did goes to disk on its own. The switch in the status line says whether that is happening. It is set per document, since how often you want a particular file written is a fact about that file.

So Save is for the times when nothing is writing itself. You may have turned automatic writing off for this document. A form still being laid out holds it, because writing one half-built would put a document on disk with no form in it. An encrypted document holds it, because writing it takes the password off. And a document with no file yet has nowhere to go until you name one.

Saving is also where the document is asked about, and each of these is put to you once rather than on every write:

• A password comes off. An encrypted document cannot be written back encrypted, so you are told, with Save Anyway and Cancel.
• Black-out marks are still only marks. If any have not been applied you get a count and the choice of Save Anyway or Make Marks Permanent…, with a box to stop being reminded. The pages look right, and what is under them is still in the file. See Making marks permanent.
• Redactions another application marked are named too, but there is no offer to apply them. They carry none of your reasons and appear in none of your records, so removing what is under them is not this application's decision.

Saving happens either way after each of these, and a permanent copy, if you asked for one, is written from the saved document afterwards.

A document made from pictures has no file of its own, so Save asks where to put one PDF and leaves the pictures where they are. Writing the pictures back out again is a different act; see Working with pages.

Handing the document to another application

The Open in… bar is one control with two halves. Pressing the left half opens the document in Preview. Pressing the wedge beside it offers the others: Acrobat, Acrobat Reader, Illustrator and Skim are looked for, and only the ones actually installed are listed. Preview is always offered.

The list is read once, when the window is built, so an application installed while CaseLeaf is running appears after the next launch.

It opens the document you are working in, which in a window of several tabs is the one in front. What the other application opens is the file, not the screen, so a document with unwritten changes asks first: Save and Open, Open Without Saving, or Cancel. A document that has never been saved has no file to hand over, and the status line says so.

Asking for help from where you are

⌘? is contextual:

• With a mark selected, it gives you the page about that kind of mark.
• Otherwise, with a tool armed, it gives you that tool's page.

Where there is no better answer it opens the contents.

The handbook opens beside what you are reading rather than over it, in a tab of its own. Every page has an address, so a page can be linked to from a mark or kept in a bookmarking application alongside the case it belongs to.

Where to go next

• Reading a document: the panels, the page layouts, and being read to
• Marking text: highlight, underline, strike through
• Tabs and panes: several documents at once, side by side

Watch: a short video for this page is still to come.

Contents