Page Editor

The Inkwell Page Editor is the window where you author a Page Document: type onto the paper, style runs from a toolbar, stack images and freehand drawing in layers, flip the sheet over to write its back, and watch a 3D preview rendered through the exact bake path the game uses. No C++, no Blueprint. The WYSIWYG guarantee is structural rather than cosmetic. The edit box uses the same rich-text marshaller class as the runtime bake, the strokes on the page are drawn by the bake’s own stroke renderer, and the preview composites the real baked ink through the same lit material a placed actor wears. All three columns are one splitter, and the right column is another splitter inside it, so you can give the space to whichever part of the job you are doing. Every pane has a minimum size, so none of them can be dragged shut and lost. The window opens at 1680 × 980, is titled Inkwell Page Editor — DocumentName, and maximizes and minimizes normally. Each document gets one window: opening a document that is already open brings its window to the front instead of making a second one.

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Opening the editor

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The toolbar

Left to right (the toolbar wraps onto a second row when the window is narrow): The toolbar follows your cursor. Click inside a styled passage and the controls update to show that run’s font, size, color, bold/italic (recovered from the typeface name, so BoldItalic lights both), underline and strikethrough. On untagged text the size, color and B/I/U/S toggles snap back to the document defaults while the font family stays armed for the next run you style. Selections survive toolbar clicks: the edit box keeps its selection when a button steals focus, and focus returns to the text after each apply.

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The three modes

One page surface, three things your mouse can mean. The mode also switches itself when you select a layer, so picking an image layer in the Layers panel puts you in Image mode rather than leaving you clicking at something the current tool cannot touch. Outside Text mode a banner is drawn across the top of the page, in orange for Image mode and blue for Draw mode, saying that text editing is off and how to get back to it:

IMAGE MODE — drag image layers. Esc returns to Text Mode.

DRAW MODE — draw on the page. Esc returns to Text Mode.

Esc returns to Text mode from anywhere in the window. Leaving Draw mode mid-stroke drops that stroke — a mark belongs to the mode it was started in. Entering Draw mode with no drawing layer selected points the selection at an existing drawing layer when the page has one; otherwise the first stroke creates a new drawing layer to live in.

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The page surface

The center pane draws the page at its real geometry — laid out in page pixels and scaled to fit the pane — with the paper (tinted by Paper Tint) behind a transparent rich-text box. Typing. Type straight onto the paper. Text auto-wraps, honors the text box’s own justification and line spacing, and renders untagged runs in the document’s Default Text Style. A text layer that fills the page wraps inside the document’s Margins Px; a placed text box wraps at its own width. Text box outlines. In Text mode the selected text layer — and only that one — is framed by four thin strips that sit just outside the box. Drag any strip to move the box. The strips are outside the box on purpose: the interior stays genuinely empty, so a click in the middle still lands on the writing and puts the caret where you aimed it. An outline around every text box would bury a page whose author is trying to read what they wrote. Dragging images. In Image mode every visible, unlocked image layer gets a drag box over its whole area — orange when selected, blue otherwise. Click to select, drag to move. Drags convert screen pixels back into page pixels, so the result is the same at any zoom or pane width, and one drag is one undo step. An image with no texture assigned still gets a box, so you can position it before you have the art. Double-click anything to jump to it. Double-clicking any element on the page selects its layer and switches to the mode that edits it: writing lands you in Text mode with the caret in that box, a picture in Image mode, a drawing in Draw mode. It works from any mode. Two deliberate exceptions: locked layers refuse to be picked up, and double-clicking bare paper does nothing rather than hunting for whatever is stacked behind it.

Clicking my text does nothing

You are in Image or Draw mode — the banner across the page says so. Press Esc, or click the Text mode toggle. Text editing is suspended in the other two modes so that a click meant for a picture underneath the writing actually reaches it.

A layer will not select or drag

It is locked. Unlock it from the padlock on its row in the Layers panel, or from the row’s right-click menu. Locked layers still draw on the page and in the bake — locking is purely an authoring aid. Hidden layers are not drawn at all, by the surface or the bake.

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Zoom and pan

The page opens fitted to its pane — and Fit stays live, following the splitter as you resize. Everything else is on the toolbar’s Zoom group and a few chords: The zoom readout shows the current scale as a percentage; 100% is one page pixel per screen pixel. Zooming is layout only — it changes nothing on the page, never dirties the document, and page coordinates stay exact at any scale, so drags and strokes land where you aimed them at any zoom. Zoom gestures are ignored mid-stroke so a slip of the wheel cannot re-scale the page under a moving nib.

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Front and back

Every page is one face of a two-sided sheet. Directly under the Pages list sit two full-width toggles, Front and Back — page picks the sheet, this picks the side:

• A back starts blank — bare paper — and exists (and costs anything) only once you put a layer on it. Deleting a back’s last layer blanks it again, returning the sheet to the free, unauthored state.
• A dot marks an authored back: the Back toggle reads Back •, and a page row reads Page 2 •, so a journal’s backs can be surveyed from the list without flipping every sheet.
• The side survives paging. Flipping through the backs of a journal page by page is a real proofreading motion, so switching pages keeps you on the side you were reading.
• A flip is navigation, never an edit — turning the sheet over cannot dirty the asset. Half-typed text lands on the side it was typed on, and a stroke started on one side never commits onto the other.
• The 3D preview turns the sheet over with you, so the back is read from the same angle and lean as the front.

The back’s paper — same as the front, or its own texture, generated sheet, or material — is set in Paper & Ink. At runtime the Ink Page Reader flips sheets with Flip Page and reads multipage documents in book order.

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Pages

The Pages list at the top of the left panel is one toggle per page, plus five buttons: Add, Duplicate, Delete and the moves are undoable editor transactions. Switching between pages is not an edit: paging around never dirties the asset, and a stroke started on the page you are leaving is cancelled rather than committed onto the new one.

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Layers

The bottom half of the right panel is the layer stack for the current side of the current page, titled Layers (front to back) — the front of the page is the top row. Drag a row to restack it, right-click it to rename, and use the eye and padlock to hide or lock it. The + Text, + Image, + Drawing, Duplicate and Delete buttons build the stack, and the properties below the list change with the selected layer’s type. Layers is the full reference for the panel and for what each layer type carries.

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Drawing Tools

The Drawing Tools section near the bottom of the left panel holds the Brush and Erase tools, the brush type (Pen, Pencil, Marker, Crayon, Highlighter), ink color, size in page pixels, and opacity. Picking a tool switches the page into Draw mode. Drawing covers the brushes, the eraser and how strokes are stored.

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Paper & Ink

The Paper & Ink section sets the document’s paper. The Paper dropdown carries the four modes — Texture asset, Generated, Custom material, and Mesh’s own material — and the Back paper dropdown under it decides where the back of every sheet gets its stock. Below those sit the ruling settings when generated, the per-page paper override (labelled This page only, or This page’s back only while you are editing the back), and the paper tint, ink tint and ink strength. Paper covers generated paper in full; Page Documents lists the properties, the four modes and their defaults.

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Custom Mesh

The Custom Mesh section previews the document on your own mesh — a bent note, a board, a book — instead of the flat bundled sheet: A readout under the buttons reports the current face region and rotation. These settings are editor-only preview intent — copy them onto the display component’s Page Face when the real prop uses the same mesh, so the game matches what you authored against. See Ink Page Display.

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3D Preview (game-true ink)

The top half of the right panel is not another view of the page surface — it is the page on a real mesh in a lit scene. Inkwell bakes the current side’s layers into a linear, transparent ink render target through the exact runtime bake path, then composites it through the lit page material a placed actor wears — roughness response and all — on the bundled sheet sized from the document, or on the document’s Preview Mesh. Left-drag orbits, wheel zooms, and flipping to the Back turns the mesh over while the camera holds still. In Mesh’s own material mode the preview drives the ink onto the mesh’s own slot material, exactly as the game will — including showing no ink at all when that material lacks MF_InkwellPageInk, which is the same contract your players get. That is why the two panes differ, and the differences are the point:

• The surface carries editing furniture the preview does not: the caret, text box outlines, image drag boxes, the mode banner.
• Ink Tint and Ink Strength are material work, so they show up in the preview, not on the surface.
• The preview shows the ink as it will sit on the paper and the mesh — where a stroke lets grain through, where a highlighter goes under the writing, how the sheet catches the light.

Bakes are coalesced to at most five a second while you edit, and are held off entirely during a Size px or Width cm drag, when every tick would reallocate the render targets. Hidden layers are skipped by the preview and the bake alike. An unauthored back costs nothing: its render target is never allocated.

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Save Document

The primary button at the bottom of the left panel saves the asset — and, before it does, rebuilds the document’s hard font references: “Saves the Page Document and refreshes its hard font references so the fonts cook.” That second half matters more than it sounds. Markup stores fonts as string paths, which the cooker cannot follow. Save Document walks every text layer on both sides of every page, collects the fonts used, adds the effective default font, and writes them into the document’s Font References list so they get cooked. Anything you are still typing is flushed into the file first.

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Undo and redo

Every edit the Page Editor makes is a normal editor transaction on the document asset, so it lands on the editor’s own undo stack and the History panel lists Inkwell’s steps by name (“Draw Stroke”, “Move Text Box”, “Reorder Layer”, “Set Page Width (cm)”). The Page Editor window binds no undo keys of its own — undo and redo from the editor’s usual Edit → Undo and Edit → Redo — and the open window follows the document wherever the stack takes it. Two behaviors are worth knowing:

• Typing is grouped into bursts. A run of keystrokes is one undo step, closed by the first pause of about a second, by switching page, side or layer, or by any other edit. One step per keystroke would make Ctrl+Z useless.
• One gesture is one step. A slider drag, an image drag or a single brush stroke undoes as a whole, including the drawing layer a stroke had to create to live in — undoing a mark that left a new empty layer behind would not be undoing the mark.

Undo also refreshes the window from the asset, so the text box, the layer list and the preview all follow the document back.

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