Chapter 10 · output
Compile & export
The draft is the source of truth; everything else is a view of it. Compile turns one manuscript into whatever the work needs to become next — without ever duplicating the prose.
Recipes, not exportsOne manuscript, many editions
A Compile Recipe leads with three decisions: the scope (what of the manuscript), the edition (editor copy, ebook, print, large-print, web, fact-check, or archive), and the output. Production Profiles control the appearance — typography, layout — and stay under progressive disclosure until you need them. The same project can be a 6×9 print book on Tuesday and a web article on Wednesday, from the same paragraphs.
Six outputs, deterministicFormats
- Markdown — the canonical form. Clean, portable, yours.
- Plain text — for anywhere that takes words.
- DOCX — written by roono's own small OOXML writer (body text, footnotes, basic styles), not a third-party mega-library.
- PDF — rendered through TextKit for a deterministic print path.
- HTML — for the web.
- EPUB — accessible ebook output.
Before anything leaves, a deterministic preflight catches output problems — missing assets, broken structure — so the file you send is the file you meant to send.
Through the gate, alwaysDestinations
Publish directly to WordPress, Ghost, Substack, or a generic webhook; credentials live in the Keychain. Every destination passes through the fact-check gate — the export sheet's gate row must be green before the publish button wakes up. Watch it below.
The export sheet, in facsimile. The gate row and the publish button are one mechanism — the same one described in the evidence chapter.
Three layers of ownershipTaking the work out
The working project lives in roono's local library — fast, indexed, fully versioned. When you want files in a place you control, Compile writes them there, in two forms:
THE THREE LAYERS OF OWNERSHIPopen ↓
- The local library — where you work. Never placed inside a cloud-sync folder; sync, if enabled, is your own iCloud.
- The .roono archive — a complete, portable, non-Vault copy of the project. For backup or handoff.
- The Markdown mirror — plaintext written to a folder you choose, including Dropbox or iCloud Drive. It is output-only: it excludes the Vault, and roono stops rather than overwrite a file that changed outside the app. It is a safety copy, not a two-way sync.
Editors keep their red pensDOCX round trips
Send a DOCX to an editor and their tracked changes come back as a reviewable branch — the same accept/reject flow as any other proposal, never an overwrite of main. Your editor works in Word; you keep the Timeline.
Every edition, every format, every mirror comes from the one manuscript. There is no “final_final_v3.docx” in roono's world — there is the draft, and there are its outputs.