Settings

⌘, opens it. A toolbar across the top holds seven panes: General, Marks, Colours, Tags, Reading, Recognition and LaTeX. Each pane answers one question, rather than piling everything into one long column.

There is no OK button. Every control writes what it says the moment you change it, so you can close the window at any point without losing anything. Two settings wait instead of writing at once, and each says so where it appears: the black-out levels are read when you press Return rather than as you type, and the interface language takes effect at the next start. The window keeps the position you put it in, and takes its size from whichever pane is in front, so a pane with few controls is not shown in an oversized window.

Everything here belongs to the application rather than to a document, and carrying it to a second machine has a page of its own.

General

History categories are the words offered when you add a line to a document's history, in the order they appear in that menu. Each row is an ordinary text field - type in it to rename, drag it to reorder - and a name may carry {date}, {time}, {name} or {page}, which become the moment, the document and the page as the entry is written. The list shows the placeholder; the entry it makes shows the words. That happens once, on the way into the history, so a category that went on saying {date} would record nothing. See History for what a line records and what it does not.

Add puts a row called new event at the foot and selects it, ready to type over. Remove takes the selected row away and is greyed out until one is selected. A row left empty is dropped rather than kept, because a blank menu item cannot be chosen.

Restore Defaults, at the foot of the pane, puts back the four categories the application ships with - reviewed, corrected, filed and note. It restores the categories and nothing else: the paper size, the language and the black-out switch on the same pane stay exactly as you set them.

Paper size decides how big a blank page made with New is, and nothing else - a document you open keeps whatever size it was written in. See Getting started.

Interface is the language this application's own words are in. It changes no document. Follow the system is not the same as picking your system's language out of the list below it: picking one outright freezes it, so changing the Mac's language later does not change this application, which keeps speaking the language you picked. The change lands the next time the application starts, because the words are chosen at launch and there is no way to ask for another set while running. You are told so when you choose.

Write the record of black-outs beside the redacted file is off unless you ask for it. With it on, making black-outs permanent also writes a record beside the finished file, listing each black-out, its reason and who made it. It is off by default, because even a stated reason discloses something - see Blacking out.

Marks

Also write marks where Skim keeps its notes is about writing, not reading: notes Skim has left beside a file are offered to you whatever this says. Skim keeps them in an extended attribute beside the file rather than inside the PDF, and turning this on means this application owns that attribute - it is rewritten from this document on every save, so anything Skim put there that cannot be said in this application's own terms is lost. Off unless you turn it on. What goes into the file itself is its own page.

Levels are the levels a black-out can be restricted to, on one line with commas between them. The order is the whole meaning: a level's place in the line is its rank, least restricted first. With the four the application ships with - public, internal, confidential, counsel only - a black-out marked confidential is one that really goes for a recipient at public or internal, and stays a mark for one at counsel only. The line is read when you press Return rather than as you type, because a partial word does not identify a level; emptying it puts the shipped four back, and the grey text in the field shows that. A level on a document that is not on your line is treated as the most restricted rather than the least: the failure that matters is releasing something, so the unknown case leans that way. A document keeps whatever levels its black-outs already carry, listed here or not. See Blacking out.

Smoothing is how far apart the points of a freehand curve are kept, from 8 to 48 points, with the number itself beside the slider rather than left as somewhere in the middle. To the left it follows the hand closely, tremors and all, and leaves many handles to re-bend the line by; to the right it draws a calmer line through fewer of them. It changes the next curve drawn, never one already on a page - see Working on a path.

Two switches on this pane belong to pages of their own. Ask before a crop removes what is outside it is the warning in front of cropping, and Point out black-out marks that have not been applied is the one in front of saving a document that is not redacted yet. Both are here because a dialog with Do not ask again on it needs a way to be turned back on. Without this pane, dismissing the warning for good before an act that cannot be undone would be permanent.

Colours

This pane lists every swatch with what it means, its outline, its fill, the letter that arms it and whether it is on the bar, and has Add, Remove and Restore Defaults under the list. All eight are on Colours and swatches, which is also where the reason for naming a colour at all is set out.

Tags

Two lists side by side, and they are two on purpose. In the documents open now, on the left, is every tag found on a mark in the documents you have open - adopted or not - with how many marks carry each. In your vocabulary, on the right, is the list you have adopted, counted the same way. One list could answer how many marks does an adopted tag have and could not answer what is on this document that I have never adopted, which is usually why you opened the pane.

› adopts the tag selected on the left into the vocabulary. ‹ removes the one selected on the right. Neither touches a mark, and nor does renaming a vocabulary entry in place, giving it a colour, or taking it out altogether. A tag is the word in a mark's comment and nothing else; this is your own list of words kept beside that, and a word removed from your list is still on every mark that carries it. The colour stays too: a colour is tied to the tag's name, not to any single mark.

The chip at the left of a row is that colour: click it to open the colour panel on it, ⌥-click to take the colour away. Colouring a tag on the left-hand list does not adopt it - the arrow is the only thing that does.

Export… writes the vocabulary and its colours to a property list. Import… reads one back and merges it: a tag you already have keeps its colour, and gains one only if it had none. Importing adds to your vocabulary; it does not replace it. You are told how many tags were added and how many were given a colour they did not have. See Tags.

Reading

Let screen readers read the text on the page is off by default, and not for tidiness: building a page's tree of text for assistive software can hang, and the hang ends the application. Turn it on if you use a screen reader and accept that.

Remember where I was covers the page, the zoom and the scroll position at the close, together with the tab's colour. In the document writes them into the file, so they travel with it. On this Mac only never touches the file at all, which is what a read-only or shared document needs - one the writer cannot change still comes back where you left it. In the document and on this Mac does both, and is what you get unless you say otherwise.

Speed, in words a minute is what Spritz Selection opens at: 100 to 900, in steps of 25. The panel's own + and − write the same value, so a speed you settle on while reading is the speed it starts at next time. See Reading a document.

Keep pictures no finer than and How hard to compress one are used by File ▸ Document ▸ Compress Pictures… and by nothing else - an ordinary save never changes a picture. The first is dots per inch, measured at the size a picture is actually drawn: 200 is above what any screen shows and below what a scanner writes, 300 is what a printer wants for artwork, 150 is for a bundle going out by mail, and 0 leaves every picture alone. The second runs from 0.2 to 0.98, and works opposite to what you might expect: a picture is only replaced when the smaller version really is smaller, so a high setting means less change, not more.

Speed, as a percentage of normal is Read Aloud, where 100 is the voice's own rate, from 50 to 200 in steps of ten. It takes effect the next time reading starts, because a voice cannot be sped up in the middle of a sentence.

Check caseleaf.app for a newer handbook is on unless you turn it off. Once a day, the first time you open the application that day, it asks the site whether a newer copy of this handbook exists and, if so, downloads and installs it - the pages you are reading now can improve without a new version of the application itself. Turned off, the handbook stays exactly as this copy shipped with. Check Now asks right away instead of waiting for the next day, and says what it found - already the newest, a version it just installed, or why it could not reach the site - underneath the button.

How alike counts as the same sits on this pane too, and belongs to finding near-duplicate pages.

A number typed into any field on this pane is put back into range and onto the same step its own arrows move in, so 195 where the step is 25 becomes 200. A field can never show a value its arrows could not have reached, so the display always matches what the setting will actually do.

Recognition

The list is every language this Mac's recogniser offers, asked of the recogniser rather than written down here, so a language that arrives with a system update appears without anything else changing. Each row names the language the way you would say it, with its tag beside it, because several entries otherwise read alike - the kinds of Chinese, or English as two countries spell it.

Tick them in the order you want them tried. A tick is added to the end of the list rather than sorted into it, so the rows do not move under the pointer while you are still ticking. Read the line under the list: it says what recognition will actually ask for as things stand, and you cannot work that out from the ticks alone.

With nothing ticked the choice is made for you: your own preferred languages, narrowed to the ones this recogniser supports, together with German, French, English and Italian. Those four are always included because the mistake they prevent can go unnoticed. Somebody on an English Mac working on German documents would have the recogniser told to expect English. The recogniser does not fail outright: it reads the page confidently and gets it wrong. Ticking anything at all replaces the whole of that automatic choice with your list.

Follow the System clears the ticks, which is the way back to that automatic choice once you have pinned a list of your own.

Fewest characters worth keeping decides when a page that already has text is recognised anyway. Below this many characters, a page's own text is taken for decoration - a stamped number, a running header - rather than a working text layer, and the page is read as a picture. It is 20 unless you change it, and it is a setting rather than a constant because the right number depends on the documents: a scanned book carries far more incidental text than a scanned form. Recognising part of a page is on Select a region.

LaTeX

The one pane about writing rather than reading: where a page goes back to when you ask which line set it.

Going back to the source is which editor Research ▸ Go to Source, and ⌘⇧-clicking a page, open. Editor is a list of the editors this is known to work with; the ones that are not installed on this Mac are still listed and say so, and until you pick one the first that is installed is used. Command is what actually runs, with %file and %line standing in for the file and line the map named - picking an editor fills it in, and you can edit it. There is no shell between this and the command, so a file name is a file name however it is punctuated. TeXShop's entry reads as a sentence because it is sent a script rather than a command line; edit any entry and it becomes an ordinary command line, split at the spaces. See Going back to the source.

The engine that hands a typeset PDF from TeXShop to this application is installed from a terminal rather than from here; the same page says how.

Every control, pane by pane

Every control in the Settings window, pane by pane. The ones that need explaining are described above; this is the whole set, so that nothing in the window is unaccounted for.

General

Marks

Colours

Tags

Reading

Recognition

LaTeX

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

Colours and swatches · Tags · Carrying your settings to another Mac · Contents