Bring a Word manuscript into InkSpine

1Step 1: Check your .docx file before you start

InkSpine imports .docx files directly and turns a single monolithic Word document into a structured book with separate chapters, parts, front matter, and footnotes. You do not need to clean up fonts, line spacing, or margins beforehand—InkSpine reads the structure of the document rather than its page geometry.

1. Make sure the file is saved as .docx (Word's default format since 2007). If you have an older .doc file, open it in Word, LibreOffice, or Apple Pages and choose Save As → Word Document (.docx).
2. Check how your chapters are marked. If your chapter titles use Word's built-in heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, or localized styles such as Titre 1 or Überschrift 1), InkSpine detects them automatically. If your manuscript separates chapters with manual page breaks instead of heading styles, InkSpine can split at page breaks too.

2Step 2: Start the Import wizard

You can bring a Word manuscript into InkSpine from the Welcome screen or from inside an open project:

1. On the Welcome screen, click Import. (From inside an open project, click Import book… on the Dashboard instead.)
2. Click Choose file… and pick your .docx manuscript, or drag the .docx file onto the wizard window.

3Step 3: Choose how chapters and parts are split

On the Options step (Choose › Options › Preview › Import), InkSpine inspects your document and preselects the heading levels that best match its structure:

1. Confirm or edit the Book title.
2. Set Chapters start at:
   • Pick the heading level (for example At Heading 2) that marks your chapters. Only levels your document actually contains are listed, and next to each one InkSpine shows how many chapters that choice will produce.
   • If your document has no heading styles but does have page breaks, pick At page breaks to start a new chapter at every manual page break. Choose Don't split — one chapter to keep the whole file together.
3. Set Parts if your book is divided into parts, acts, or books. When a .docx uses Heading 1 for parts (Part I: The North) and Heading 2 for chapters, InkSpine preselects Heading 1 for Parts and Heading 2 for Chapters start at. Any epigraph or introductory prose written directly under a part heading becomes that part's own page in the sidebar.
4. Pick What are you writing? (Fiction, Memoir & life writing, or Non-fiction & research) and choose the Save to parent folder on your drive.

4Step 4: Review the Preview list and finish the import

Click Preview to review the chapter list before InkSpine creates your project folder:

1. Rename, reorder, or exclude chapters. Click any chapter title to edit it inline, drag rows by their left-hand handle to change the reading order, or click × to exclude an appendix or scratch section you do not want in the manuscript.
2. Read the Before you import summary. InkSpine tells you up front how every part of the Word file will be handled:
   • Front matter: Any text that appears before the first chapter heading (such as a title page, copyright notice, or dedication) is saved automatically as a front-matter page so nothing at the top of your .docx is lost.
   • Carried across: Bold, italic, headings, bulleted and numbered lists, block quotes, links, and Word footnotes are turned into clean Markdown (footnotes become [^1] notes).
   • Adjusted elements: Word endnotes come across as footnotes, and anything plain Markdown does not carry—underlined text, tables, embedded images, text boxes—is named in the notice, so you know what to rebuild or re-add (for example, as an in-text figure) after the import.
3. Click the import button (it reads, for example, Import 24 chapters) to write the project to disk and open it. For a closer look at how working in InkSpine differs from drafting in a word processor, see InkSpine vs Microsoft Word and the feature overview.

In InkSpine

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