Exporting Your Scribes

Overview

Export your scribes in multiple formats for printing, sharing, or reading on other devices. PDF and HTML exports are book-grade by default (updated W51) — a cover, chapter opener pages, serif body type, and a table of contents, styled like a real printed book, with no AI involved. You can also customize the appearance with theme, font, spacing, trim size, and layout options, or let AI design the look for you.

Available Formats

Every format below is available to every signed-in user, unlimited, at no token cost.

How to Export

1. Open your scribe
2. Click the Export button
3. Choose your format
4. Pick one of three options:
   • Quick Download — book-grade PDF/HTML with default settings, generated instantly, no AI involved
   • Preview & Customise — adjust theme, trim size, fonts, and more before downloading, with a live preview (available to every tier — no upgrade needed)
   • Customise with AI — let AI design the look of your book (PDF only; see below)
5. Download your file

Book-Grade PDF (the new default)

Every PDF and HTML export now looks like a typeset book, not a plain report:

• A cover page with your scribe's title, subtitle, and author
• Chapter opener pages — a small-caps "CHAPTER N" label, a coloured accent rule, and the chapter title
• Serif body text with sans-serif headings, matching traditional book typography
• A clickable table of contents and PDF bookmarks (the outline panel in your PDF viewer) for fast navigation
• Bordered tables for any tabular content in your scribe

This applies to every signed-in user on Quick Download, with no tokens spent and no AI model involved — it's all generated by code from your scribe's existing chapters and sections.

No page number in the footer. The running footer along the bottom of each page shows your scribe's title, not a page number — a current constraint of our PDF renderer. Use the table of contents or your PDF viewer's bookmark/outline panel to jump between chapters; that's the intended way to navigate a Coffeescribe PDF today. A numbered-page footer is on our list for a future release.

Prefer the old look? Use Classic

If you liked the previous plain-report PDF, open Preview & Customise and switch the Theme to Classic, or pick the Classic preset. Classic reproduces the original layout exactly — no cover, no chapter openers, no accent colours.

Layout Customisation (Preview & Customise)

Available to every tier — no upgrade needed. Click Preview & Customise in the export modal to open the full customisation page. The preview shows a live paginated view of your scribe as it will appear in the export.

Four presets are available as starting points:

You can also adjust any setting individually:

The book theme's accent colour (used for chapter titles and rules) is chosen by the preset you pick or by the AI design pass below — there's no manual colour swatch, since re-rendering the full preview on every colour click was too slow to be useful.

Customise with AI

"Customise with AI" is a third option in the Export menu (and an Enhance with AI button on the customise page) that asks an AI model to design your book's look — not rewrite its content. From a single pass over your scribe, it chooses:

• An accent colour that fits your topic
• Per-chapter eyebrow labels (short descriptive tags above each "CHAPTER N")
• Optional 1–3-sentence italic chapter intros
• Optional pull-quotes pulled verbatim from your own text
• Cover kicker and subtitle copy

What it does and doesn't do:

• It never rewrites your scribe's text, changes facts, or drops citations — the design pass only touches layout and cover/chapter copy, never your chapters or sections.
• Pull-quotes are always a word-for-word excerpt of your own writing — the AI can't invent a quote.
• This sends your book's text to the AI model. Quick Download and the plain Preview & Customise page never do this — only pressing "Customise with AI" / "Enhance with AI" does.
• It costs tokens (standard token billing, same as other AI features) and is owner-only — you can't run it on someone else's public scribe.
• Your design is saved on the book, so downloading again afterward is free — you only pay again if you press "Re-run AI design."

Design instructions (optional)

Before running the AI design pass, you can type free-text guidance in the "Design instructions" box — for example, "warm academic palette, formal tone, no pull-quotes". Leave it blank for a fully automatic design. A "What can I ask for?" help box on the page gives examples for palette, mood/tone, chapter openers, pull-quotes, and cover copy. Instructions steer the design only — they can't be used to change your book's text.

Author Attribution

Choose how your name appears on your scribes:

• Created by — For AI-generated content with minimal editing
• AI-Assisted by — You significantly edited or rewrote the AI-generated content
• Written by — 100% human-written content only (a compliance warning is shown)

When your scribe has a mix of AI and human-written sections, "AI-Assisted" is suggested automatically.

• Your scribes: Your display name appears as the author. You can toggle and customize the attribution text.
• Public scribes by others: You can access Preview & Customise, but attribution controls are read-only — the original author's name is shown.
• Forks and editions automatically show the current creator's name, not the original author.

Export Limits

There's no export cap. PDF, HTML, Markdown, Word, EPUB, and StoryBook exports are all unlimited for every signed-in user, and none of them spend tokens.

Full Data Export (ZIP)

Looking to download all your data rather than a single scribe? Go to Settings > Data & Privacy and click Export Data. This downloads a ZIP file containing your profile, all scribes with metadata, highlights, and notes. Available to every signed-in user, once every 30 days.

Tips

• PDF for printing — Use A4 or US Letter page size with 18mm+ margins
• EPUB for e-readers — Best format for reading on Kindle, Kobo, or other devices
• Word for editing — Export to DOCX if you want to continue editing outside Coffeescribe
• Markdown for developers — Clean text format that works with any markdown editor