The Ribbon & Compact
Scriblit is the same editor everywhere. By default you get a Ribbon of tabs on both computers and touch devices. You can switch to Compact in Preferences. The manuscript, the spreads, and your preferences are identical wherever you work — only the controls around them change.
How Scriblit chooses a layout
Two things decide what you see: your Control style in Preferences → Editor, and how wide the window is.
- Ribbon (the default) uses the same tabbed control bar at every width, on desktop and on phones or tablets alike. The ribbon reflows for narrow widths; it never switches to action sheets.
- Compact uses its three-anchor header on a wide window and switches to the small-screen action sheets once the window is narrow (at or below roughly 700 pixels), whatever the device.
The switch follows window width, not the kind of pointer you use, so a narrow desktop window in Compact shows the same action sheets a phone does. (Touch does make individual controls larger for easier tapping — that is a separate, pointer-based touch-up.)
In this section
- The Ribbon — the File, Write, Submission, and View tabs and the tools grouped under each.
- Compact — the document-title menu, the Workspace button, and the formatting icon bar on a wide window.
- Compact on a Small Screen — the action sheets a narrow Compact window uses.
The rest of this page covers what does not change with your control style: the account menu, how files leave your device, keyboard shortcuts, and which preferences stay on one machine.
The avatar / account menu
Your avatar, at the far right of the desktop control bar, opens the account menu. It holds:
- Manage billing — shown only when billing applies to your account.
- Preferences
- Documentation
- Tutorial
- Contact Support
- Your account profile, which includes an Access Details page showing recent sign-ins and, if you have offline access active, when it expires.
The account menu is the same in Ribbon and Compact — it is always where Preferences, Documentation, and Help live when they are not already visible elsewhere.
Saving and sharing differences
The actions are the same, but the way a file leaves your device depends on the platform.
- On a computer that supports direct file access, Save writes back to the file you opened. In browsers without that access, such as Firefox and Safari, Save becomes Download Save Copy and the project file downloads instead of saving in place.
- On a phone or tablet, sharing an export hands the file to your device’s native share sheet, so you can send it to Mail, Messages, Files, or any app you already use, rather than downloading to a folder.
- Saving to Google Drive and opening from Google Drive work the same on every platform, because the file travels directly between your browser and your Google account.
For the full picture of project files and exports, see Saving & Exporting.
Keyboard and pointer
Keyboard shortcuts work wherever a keyboard is available, including on the Ribbon: insert a spread, toggle formatting, and save without reaching for a tab. On Compact’s small-screen sheets, the same actions appear as tap rows and leave the shortcut hints out, since there is usually no keyboard to press them on. Dragging a spread divider by its page-range label works with either a mouse or a finger.
Preferences that stay on one device
Almost every preference follows your account across devices. A few do not, by design: the recovery toggle, the autosave-to-linked-file settings, and the Clear stored data action in the Offline & Storage tab always affect only the browser in front of you, because they concern data physically held on that machine. See Preferences for the full list.