iA Writer 4+

Paragraphs

I’ve been using your Writer and Writer Pro apps ever since they came out and I can’t but congratulate The Information Architects team for a great job they did. As a writer (journalist/columnist/editor) I know how important it is to have a tool that gets one focused on nothing but the text, with a minimum of attention payed to formatting and how the text looks. The Syntax function is of no use for me, unfortunately, as I write in a unsupported language, but I can live without it. The font in the Write mode is just fantastic. I would like to use it always, whatever I write.

However, there is a reason—just one reason—I still use Apple’s Pages app for most texts I write (except some non-journalistic ones).

The thing I miss in Writer Pro is a visual marker for paragraphs.

Any professional writer knows how important it is to organize a text by paragraphs. As a unit of text, a paragraph is as important as a sentence. A trained eye can quickly distinguish sentences by spotting a sequence of a period, a space, and an uppercase letter. (You guessed right, German is not my language.)

Alas, in Writer Pro, I can’t always distinguish the paragraphs and even when/if I do, with some unnecessary and unwanted effort, it is not enough.

Sometimes the last line of a prevoius paragraph is (almost) as long as the first (full) line of the next paragraph. Sometimes the last word in a line is long and makes one think—due to text-wrapping—that it’s the last line of a paragraph.

You certainly know better than me how to make paragraphs visible. You could increase vertical space between paragraphs, make an indentation of the first line, or add some other visual marker on the left side of the first line of a paragraph—but please, make it more visible somehow.

Otherwise, keep up the good work.