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Four stages: press Play in the bundled showroom and see everything working, author a page of your own, put it on an actor in your level, and wire reading into the interaction system your project already has. That last stage is the point — Inkwell’s reading pipeline is built to be driven by your interact verb, and the bundled demo pieces exist only to show you the calls. If the plugin is not installed and enabled yet, do Installation first — this page assumes the Page Editor button is in your Level Editor toolbar.
1

Press Play in the showroom

In the Content Browser, open Settings and turn on Show Plugin Content. Then browse to Plugins → Inkwell Content → Maps and open L_InkwellShowroom. Press Play.You are standing in a room of readable paper: six podium exhibits, a gallery wall and a wall poster. Walk up to any of them:
An Inkwell note placed in the showroom level

The sample note on its podium in the showroom.

The map works in an empty project because its GameMode Override is the Inkwell Reader Game Mode (AInkwellReaderGameMode), which spawns the Inkwell Reader Character — a first-person pawn whose movement and look input is built at runtime in C++, so no project input assets are involved at all.
Everything that makes the showroom play by itself — the reader game mode, the reader character, the Ink Page Interactor component, the exhibit component and the read prompt widget — is a demo and reference implementation, not recommended for production use. The production components are Ink Page Display, Ink Page Stack, the Ink Page actor and widget, and the Ink Page Reader — the component your own interaction system drives in step 4.
2

Create and author an Ink Page Document

In the Content Browser, right-click in the empty space of a folder in your project and choose Inkwell → Page Document. Name the asset and press Enter.That asset (UInkPageDocument) is the content: every page, every layer, the paper and the default text style. A new one is seeded from your project settings so it renders something immediately — a 1024 × 1400 px page, the bundled plain paper texture, and the project’s default font at Regular weight. It opens straight into the Page Editor.
The Level Editor toolbar with the Inkwell Page Editor dropdown button highlighted

Inkwell's Page Editor button (1) sits at the right end of the Level Editor toolbar.

From the Level Editor toolbar, open the Page Editor dropdown and choose Create New Page Document… — you get an asset-save dialog, and the new document opens in the editor when you confirm. The same dropdown holds Edit Document… (a browser dialog), Recent / All Documents (documents you edited recently plus a filter-as-you-type list of every one in the project), and a Documentation entry that opens this site. Right-clicking a placed actor that references a document offers Inkwell → Edit Pages (DocumentName)… in the viewport too.
The Inkwell menu: Edit Document, Recent / All Documents, Create New Page Document, Import Font Family

The Inkwell menu, from the Page Editor button in the Level Editor toolbar.

The window opens in three resizable panes:
The Inkwell Page Editor window

The Page Editor, with the three panes it opens in.

1

1 — Left panel

Everything about the document: Pages, Page Setup, Paper & Ink, Custom Mesh, Default Text Style, Drawing Tools, and the Save Document button at the bottom.
2

2 — Toolbar

Styling for the text you have selected: font family, size, B / I / U / -S-, text color, and the three justify buttons. On the right, Mode switches the page surface between Text, Image and Draw.
3

3 — The page

The paper itself, at the shape you authored. In Text mode you click into it and type; each text box is outlined so you can see where it ends.
4

4 — Right panel

3D Preview (game-true ink) on top — the page put through the same bake path the game uses — and Layers (front to back) underneath.
Click on the paper and type. A new document opens with one Text layer that fills the page inside the document margins, so you can start writing immediately. Then style it: select some text, pick a font family (the five bundled families are listed first), set a size, toggle B / I / U / -S-, or click the color block to recolor the selection. Watch the 3D Preview on the right as you go — it is the truth: if a font falls back or a color reads wrong there, it will read wrong in game.When you want more than one block of text, an image, or something drawn by hand, use the buttons under the Layers list: + Text, + Image, + Drawing. See Layers, Drawing and Paper — none of it is needed for this walkthrough.Finish by clicking Save Document at the bottom of the left panel.
Save from that button rather than from the Content Browser. Rich-text markup stores fonts as string paths, which the cooker cannot see — Save Document is what refreshes the document’s Font References list so those fonts get cooked. Skip it and styled runs fall back to the default font in a packaged build.
3

Put the page on an actor in your level

Two routes. Take the first if you want paper in the world; take the second if the note belongs on a prop, a desk, a clipboard or a corkboard you already have.
Open the Place Actors panel (Window → Place Actors), search for Ink Page, and drag it into your level. It is the ready-made single sheet (AInkPageActor) and lands as a flat piece of paper.With it selected, find the PageDisplay component in the Details panel’s component list and set its Document to your new asset. The writing appears on the sheet immediately — the display component previews in the editor viewport, no Play needed.The sheet then sizes itself: Page Width Cm from the document (21 cm, the width of A4, unless you changed it) with the height following the page’s shape. Two knobs adjust this copy without touching the document:
Press Play and walk over to it. The page is real geometry at the size you authored, so it reads from a normal standing distance — and lean in and the strokes hold, because the ink is baked at the document’s own pixel resolution rather than stretched from a small texture.
4

Wire reading into YOUR interaction system

To let the player pick the page up — float it in front of the camera, turn pages, put it back exactly where it lay — add an Ink Page Reader (UInkPageReaderComponent) to your pawn or player controller.The reader is the production presentation engine, and it contains no input handling whatsoever: it is a pure snap-into-view service that your interaction code calls. Whatever your project’s interact verb is — an Enhanced Input action, a trace in a base interactable Blueprint, a trigger volume — the wiring is the same four calls:
  1. Begin reading. In your interact handler, take the actor your existing focus trace hit and call Begin Reading Actor on the reader — it finds the Ink Page Display on the actor for you. (Call Begin Reading instead if you already have the display component.) It returns false when the actor has no readable page or something is already being read, so you can fall through to your other interactables.
  2. Turn pages. From your UI or input, call Next Page and Previous Page on the reader. On a sheet with an authored back, Next Page reads in book order — front, back, then the next page.
  3. Flip the sheet. Flip Page turns the held page over to show its back. Out of the box the reader also binds F to this (Bind Flip Key, default on, key editable) — turn that off once you bind your own flip input.
  4. Put it back. End Reading floats the page back to exactly where it lay.
Bind the reader’s events to keep your HUD honest: On Reading Started / On Reading Ended (hide the crosshair, show a “put back” prompt), and On Reading Side Changed for a Front / Back label that swaps exactly on the turn.While a page is held, the reader stops the pawn by default — Lock Movement While Reading and Lock Look While Reading are both on, and release the moment End Reading is called. The hold distance is computed from the page’s real size (Fit Page To View, default on), so a sticky note and a poster are both held where they fill the screen comfortably.
Two reference implementations show this wiring, both demo-only:
  • The Ink Page Interactor (UInkPageInteractorComponent) is the complete “look at a page, press a key, read it” component from the showroom — a view trace every 0.1 s out to 300 cm, an On Focus Changed event for a prompt, and default keys (E / Q / Left / Right, plus the mouse wheel) behind an Enable Default Input switch. Read it as a worked example; in production, make the calls above from your own system instead. See Ink Page Interactor.
  • The example input assets in /Inkwell/Examples/Input/ — IA_Interact, IA_NextPage, IA_PreviousPage, IA_PutBack and the mapping context IMC_InkwellDefault binding them to E / Right / Left / Q and the mouse wheel — are there for projects that drive their own pawn with Enhanced Input and want ready-made actions to start from.

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Next

The full integration guide

The worked example: a base interactable Blueprint, focus prompts, reading, page turns and flips, all driven by your own system.

Ink Page Reader

Every property and Blueprint node on the component your interaction system drives.

The Page Editor

The toolbar, the three modes, layers, paper and the game-true preview, end to end.

Example content

What ships in the showroom and /Inkwell/Examples/, and how each piece is wired.