The edition, the book you share

Your working file, the .exar, is your workshop: all your books, the whole world, your notes, what you're preparing for later. What you give to read is something else: an edition, an .xrtb file with one book as it goes out into the world.

Why an edition

• You don't send the wrong file. What you share doesn't carry your notes or the secrets of the books to come: they aren't inside, not even hidden.
• It's always the same book. "Edition 3" says the same today and a year from now. If you correct something, you write in your work and generate edition 4.
• It weighs less. It carries only what is read, and you can lighten its images.

Generate an edition

Choose Work → Publish → Generate edition, or click Generate edition on the Work tab of the ribbon. In a series, each book also has its own Generate edition button in the series panel.

The wizard has five steps, which you can go through in any order you like:

1. The book. The one you have open; in a series, you choose which. Each edition is of a single book.
2. What is missing. The book is reviewed the way a publisher would review it. What's under Prevents generating has to be resolved —for example, the title or the author—; the rest (An official book has it; you decide) are warnings, such as the cover or the synopsis. Each warning takes you to where it's fixed.
3. What travels. Which entities, properties, relationships, images, facts and timelines go in the book. Exaratio proposes: what appears in this book, yes; what doesn't appear, no; what already traveled in an earlier book of the series, yes. You decide. The first time, review the proposal and click Accept the proposal for what is left for the rest. If the book has a paper, it is listed last, under The book’s paper: it is included unless you uncheck it. If its license doesn't allow sharing it, the review tells you and the edition is created without it.
4. See as a reader. Open it as the reader will see it opens the edition, before generating it, in another window, just as whoever reads it will have it. It's the best way to check that nothing slips out.
5. Generate. Choose how you want the images —As they are, Balanced, Compact or Minimum, with the size before and after in view— and click Generate the edition. Your working file doesn't change: its images stay as they were.

The edition is saved in a new file, never over your work, and its number is noted in the manuscript, next to the book. Numbers only go up: deleting an edition doesn't give its number back.

What never travels

Without your having to decide it: your notes and annotations, research and everything in the workshop, statuses, tags and plots, continuity rules and warnings, the other books of the series, and the images and fonts that aren't used.

What does travel and the book reveals later on goes hidden: whoever reads discovers it on reaching that point (Who is here, without spoilers).

Share it

The edition is the file you can give to read. It's signed and protected like your work (How a work is protected): it can be read in any Exaratio, with a license or without one, and no one can edit it. Only you, its author, can export it to another format —an EPUB for your publisher, for example—, and what you export no longer carries that protection (Export: formats and options).

If the edition is yours

If you ever lose your working file and you still have an edition, you can get a new work out of it: open it and choose Work → Publish → Rebuild a work from this edition. The new work has what the edition carries; your notes and what didn't travel don't come back. Only you, its author, see this option.

If you read an edition

An edition always opens for reading. Its presentation (The work's presentation and its book) says which edition it is and from when, and when you go in to read, a note reminds you that it's an edition. It's a finished book: you read it, annotate it and rate it, but it doesn't change (Read a work with Exaratio).