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Preview, Sharing & Export#

FoldNotes can render your Markdown as formatted HTML and export to multiple formats.

Preview#

Tap or click the preview button in the toolbar to open a rendered view of the current note. You can also press Cmd+Shift+P (macOS, or iPad with an external keyboard).

The preview:

  • Supports dark and light themes (follows your system appearance)
  • Renders all Markdown features: headings, lists, tables, code blocks, images, task checkboxes
  • Styles FoldNotes-specific syntax: wikilinks, tags, date references, task metadata, admonition callouts
  • Renders Mermaid diagrams — fenced code blocks with the mermaid language tag are rendered as interactive diagrams (flowcharts, sequence diagrams, Gantt charts, etc.)

On macOS, the preview opens in a separate window that updates live as you edit — including across multiple windows viewing the same note. Task checkboxes in the macOS preview are interactive (see Ticking Tasks below). On iOS, the preview shows a snapshot of the note at the time it was opened.

When the editor is hoisted on a heading, the preview scopes to just that heading and its descendants. This is the easiest way to render or export a single chapter from a longer document — hoist the chapter, then open Preview and export. Learn more about Hoist →

In the macOS preview window, [[wiki-links]] are clickable: click one to follow it and the preview loads that note in place. Use the Back and Forward buttons in the preview toolbar to move through the notes you've visited — a browsing history that's kept entirely separate from the editor, so following a link in the preview never moves your editing cursor or opens new editor windows.

Only links that resolve to an existing note are clickable. A [[wiki-link]] whose target doesn't exist renders as plain text (no underline), so an underlined link in the preview is always one you can follow.

macOS only

Wiki-link navigation and the Back/Forward buttons are available in the macOS preview window only. On iOS the preview is a static snapshot — there is no room in the iPhone preview toolbar for navigation controls. To follow a link on iOS, use the link preview card in the editor.

Ticking Tasks#

Task checkboxes in the macOS preview are live. Click one to cycle it through the same four states as the editor:

Click State Looks like
1st In progress Half-filled amber box
2nd Done Blue box with a tick — done: and today's date are appended to the line
3rd Cancelled Grey box with a dash
4th Not started Empty box (back to the start)

The change is written straight to the note, so it's reflected everywhere at once:

  • On the note you're editing, the edit lands in the document immediately.
  • On a note you've followed a wiki-link to (see above), the change is written to that note — even though it isn't the note open in the editor. If that note happens to be open in another window, its editor updates too.
  • From elsewhere — tick a task on the Task Board, the calendar, or a project, and any open preview of that note keeps up automatically. The sync runs both ways.

macOS only

Interactive checkboxes are a macOS preview feature. The iOS preview is a static snapshot; tick tasks in the editor there.

Figure captions#

Give a picture a description and it becomes a caption, printed beneath the figure in the preview, in every export format, and in a bound manuscript.

The description is the text in the square brackets:

![The north face at dawn](north-face.png)

That renders as the picture with The north face at dawn beneath it. Leave the brackets empty and there is no caption and no space where one would be:

![](north-face.png)

A drawing you named is captioned by that name, with nothing else to do. A drawing you left unnamed appears without a caption.

The picture has to be alone in its paragraph#

A caption is only added when the picture stands on its own line, with a blank line above and below it:

Here is the route we took.

![The north face at dawn](north-face.png)

We turned back at the col.

A picture written inside a sentence stays where you put it, inline, with no caption:

The route follows ![this line](route.png) to the summit.

This is deliberate rather than a limitation. It is the same rule Pandoc and Obsidian use, so a note that captions correctly in FoldNotes captions correctly when you take it elsewhere — and it is the only rule that can tell "a figure with a caption" apart from "a small picture in a sentence", since both are written with the same Markdown.

Pictures you insert from the toolbar are placed this way automatically, so they caption without you thinking about it. It only matters when you are typing the Markdown yourself.

Sharing & Export#

All sharing and export goes through the preview screen. The preview toolbar provides format options that differ by platform:

Format macOS iOS Description
PDF Print-ready with professional typography
HTML A single self-contained file — pictures included
HTML Folder The page plus an assets folder holding every file
Markdown Clean Markdown with front matter stripped
RTF Rich Text Format for word processors
Email The note as a formatted message, with its pictures and files attached
DOCX Microsoft Word document
EPUB E-book format
TextBundle Markdown plus its attachments in a single bundle

What travels with each format#

An image can be carried inside almost anything. A document — a PDF, a spreadsheet, a Word file, a recording — cannot be embedded in a page or a PDF, so each format handles it differently.

This table describes macOS. See the note below for iPhone and iPad.

Format Pictures Documents & audio
HTML (single file) Embedded in the page Named in the text, not carried — a single file has nowhere to put them
HTML Folder Copied to assets Copied to assets, and the links in the page open them
Email Attached, scaled down for mail Attached as the real files
TextBundle Inside the bundle Inside the bundle
PDF, DOCX, EPUB Rendered into the document Named in the text, not carried

Which HTML export do I want?

HTML is one file you can send, upload, or open anywhere — nothing to keep beside it. HTML Folder gives you a folder containing the page and an assets folder with the real files, so a spreadsheet mentioned in your note is a spreadsheet the reader can open. Use the single file when you want one thing to send; use the folder when you want everything to travel.

On iPhone and iPad

PDF carries your pictures today. The other formats — HTML, Rich Text, Print and Email — currently send the note's text without them, and will carry them in a future release. TextBundle, EPUB, Word and HTML Folder are macOS features and are not planned for iOS.

Where email puts your pictures

Mail places attachments at the end of a message, so your pictures arrive beneath the text rather than where they sit in the note. That is how Mail composes a message, not something FoldNotes can change. Captions are left out of an emailed note for the same reason — a caption above nothing is worse than no caption.

Sharing Options#

Exports can optionally strip FoldNotes-specific syntax so the output is clean for sharing. The defaults live in Settings → Sharing (and Settings → Privacy for comments) on both platforms:

  • Comments — keep <!--comments--> private (Settings → Privacy)
  • Strip Tags — removes #tags from the output
  • Flatten Backlinks — converts [[Note Title]] wikilinks to plain text
  • Tasks — keep all task content, strip metadata only (due dates, priority), or strip entire task lines

The preview always shows the full note. These options only affect what leaves it — and they apply to every export and share action, including Print and Email.

The Content control#

The preview toolbar's Content button opens a popover for the note you're previewing:

  • It's seeded from your Settings defaults each time you open a preview.
  • You can override any option for that preview only — Comments and Tags checkboxes, plus a Keep / Strip metadata / Strip lines task choice — without changing your Settings.
  • The overrides reset to the defaults the next time you open a preview; they never write back to Settings.
  • Flatten Backlinks isn't in the popover — it's always applied from your Settings default.

Print#

Both platforms support printing the rendered note from the preview. Print honours the current Content choices, so anything you've chosen to strip is stripped from the printout too.

Theming#

The preview uses professional typography:

  • Body text in Charter/Georgia serif
  • Headings in sans-serif
  • Code in monospace with rounded borders
  • Tables with collapsed borders and striped rows

Colours adapt to your system appearance (dark/light mode).