Import & Export

Penpoint keeps your work on your own computer, and it's happy to hand it back to you whenever you want. Bring in a manuscript you started somewhere else, pull in worldbuilding (your characters, locations, and other story details) you drafted in another tool, or send a polished copy of your book out to submit, publish, or share. Exporting only ever makes copies: it never changes or removes anything from your book.

Two Kinds of Content

Almost everything here comes down to which of two things you're moving, because each has its own tools in its own place, the same on Mac and Windows:

• Your manuscript: the actual prose you write in Manuscript Mode, organized into chapters and scenes. Its import and export tools live in Manuscript Mode itself, in the row of buttons at the top of the page.
• Your worldbuilding: your characters, locations, items, notes, chapter outlines, and arcs. Its import and export tools live in Settings, under Import/Export.

Getting Data Out (Export)

You choose what to include, pick a file format, and Penpoint saves a copy wherever you like. Common reasons: submitting to an agent, uploading to a store, backing up a readable copy, or handing notes to a co-author.

• Exporting Manuscripts: Turn your prose into one document. Export the whole book, a single chapter, or one scene, as Word, EPUB (e-book file), PDF, Markdown (a plain-text file with light formatting marks), Rich Text, or Plain Text, with control over the title page, chapter headers, scene breaks, and paragraph style (with a live preview).
• Standard Submission Format — a format choice already set to the exact formatting literary agents expect.
• Exporting to Scrivener — export your manuscript as a Scrivener 3 project instead of a single file, chapters and scenes intact.
• Pasting Your Manuscript Into a Form — for agencies and contests that want your pages pasted, not attached as a file.
• Exporting Worldbuilding Data: Save any of the six worldbuilding types (characters, locations, items, notes, chapter outlines, arcs) to Word, PDF, Markdown, Rich Text, or Plain Text, as one combined file or a tidy folder of separate files, optionally with images.
• Generating Templates: Create blank fill-in-the-blank files shaped like your book. Great for drafting new entries in a text editor, handing to a collaborator without Penpoint, or feeding to an AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude. Anything you fill in imports straight back.
• Exporting a Book: Saving a whole book as a .penpoint file, to move between your own computers or share with another Penpoint writer. This is different from the three content exports above: those save readable documents like Word or PDF; this saves your entire book as a file only Penpoint can open.

Getting Data In (Import)

Three separate things can come in, depending on what you have:

• Importing Your Data: The overview of the two content imports: a manuscript written in another app (Word, EPUB, Rich Text, Markdown, or plain text), or worldbuilding from Markdown files. It explains which tool to use and where each one lives.
• Importing Data: The full worldbuilding Import Wizard: bring characters, locations, items, notes, chapter outlines, and arcs back from Markdown, with a preview of what each file contains, automatic checks that catch formatting problems before anything imports, a choice of what to do when a file matches something you already have (overwrite, skip, or keep both), and auto-created placeholders for anything your files mention.
• Importing a Book: Opening a whole .penpoint file, one you exported or someone shared with you, as its own book. This is different from the two content imports above, which bring pieces into a book you already have open.