Welcome!

Thank you for choosing Zettlr as your new One-Stop Publication Workbench. Zettlr is a powerful writing tool for all your needs. It is designed for anyone with a serious need to write, and goes out of your way to allow you to write frictionless.

In these pages, you will find everything you need to know in order to make the most of your experience with the app. And in case something is still unclear, you can always find support in our community.

For academics at every level, from student to faculty, Zettlr offers comprehensive support for citations and entire projects, and it includes a powerful templating engine that enables you to quickly typeset camera-ready paper drafts. Zettlr further contains a set of scientific tools for all disciplines.

For authors, Zettlr ships with extensive support for full-text search, tools for refining your language and grammar, and organizing your work with tables and charts as you write.

And for anyone else, it allows the easy setup of an all-inclusive Zettelkasten or PKMS workflow with a built-in graph-view.

Navigating this Documentation

This documentation is built on top of VuePress, which offers a set of features to make finding answers to your questions and discovering the right information straight-forward. Here we provide you with some pointers on how to navigate these pages:

• You can browse all documentation pages by category in the sidebar to the left.
• At the top, you can find quick links to common documentation pages, such as troubleshooting info or general setup help.
• Besides that, you can find a language selector to switch between languages. Note: Some community translations do not contain all information from the official English documentation.
• The documentation includes a full-text search across all documentation pages and lets you jump directly to the relevant content.
• The table of contents for the current page is displayed in a sidebar to the right when you browse the documentation with a larger screen.

Documentation Contents

Quickly jump into the section you want to consult:

Introduction to Zettlr

🏁 Getting Started: Installing Zettlr, securing it, and find troubleshooting help.

🧑‍💻 First Time Users: Read this after installing the app for the first time. Use the “Next”- and “Previous”-buttons to navigate through this section, because it is meant to be read start to finish.

The Interface

🗄️ File Manager: Describes the file manager, and how it displays your files. This section also includes descriptions of central concepts of the app, such as workspaces.

🪟 Split View: Introduces the split view, and how you can use it efficiently.

📋 Sidebar: Describes the sidebar, and what information it can deliver during your workflows.

Writing in Zettlr

📝 Markdown Editor: Describes the central Markdown document editor and all its functionality.

🪮 Language and Style: Learn how Zettlr can help you write good prose with spell checkers, grammar checkers, and style checkers.

🤖 Exporting: In-depth explainer of how the exporting system works and how you can use it to your advantage.

🧪 Scientific and Technical: Describes features of the app primarily relevant to scientists or technical writers.

🗃️ PKMS/Zettelkasten: Set up Zettlr as a personal knowledge management system.

Guides & Reference Material

💡 Guides: Contains step-by-step guides to realizing some more complex features; from customizations to full journal or conference templates.

⚙️ Reference: Includes descriptions on available keyboard shortcuts and settings.

Community

Some questions you have may not be answered by this documentation. This is completely normal, especially as you tweak Zettlr more to conform to your personal habits. In this case, we invite you to join the wider community of Zettlr and ask other users. Very often, you are not the first to have some specific issue, and you will find quick help among the members of our various platforms.

• The Community Forum: In our community forum, you can ask questions publicly. This way, you can even help others who may encounter these questions only after you, since both your questions and others' answers become public records.
• The Zettlr Discord: On our Discord server, you can ask short and quick questions and typically get an answer very quickly. The short-messaging format is sometimes more convenient, especially if there is a lot of back and forth.
• The Zettlr Subreddit: Here you can ask questions to the broader reddit community.

The company Gurubase offers an LLM-integration with this documentation to peruse, allowing you to “chat” with the documentation.

Get Involved!

Zettlr is free and open source software, which means that its source code is publicly available, and the application comes at no cost. However, this also means that there is no paid staff behind the app – it is completely managed by the community. This means that we actively encourage users to get involved with the app. Depending on your skills and what you like most, there are various ways in which you can help Zettlr out:

• You can translate the app (GitHub account required).
• You can translate and improve this documentation (GitHub account required).
• You can join the community on Reddit, Discord, and GitHub Discussions and help new and other users.
• You can tackle open issues on GitHub and help develop the application itself (GitHub account required).

More information on how to get involved can be found here in the documentation.