A book is a made object. Somebody chose its page size, its typeface, how far down the page a chapter begins, what the header whispers at the top of every spread. Usually that somebody is a typesetter, long after the writer is done.
In Charc, that somebody can be you — and the last post showed the escape hatch that makes this safe to ignore: export styles can override everything at compile time. But if you care how the printed page looks, or you’re publishing yourself and there is no typesetter coming, this post is the tour of the controls.
The organizing idea is one word: format.
A format is the whole design in one bundle
A format bundles everything this post covers — page size, margins, typography, chapter openings, headers and footers — into a single named design. Six are built in: Charc Default (8.5×11), Trade Paperback (6×9), Digest (5.5×8.5), Mass Market (4.25×6.87), Large Print (6×9), and Screenplay (US Letter).
Change anything and Apply saves it to this project alone. Save as new format turns your changes into a design you can reuse across books — and formats export and import as files, so a series can share one design, or a designer can hand you theirs.
You met this choice already, in the New Project modal. Nothing about it is permanent; a project can go from manuscript format to trade paperback in one pick, months into the draft.
The page itself
Choose a trim size or set width and height yourself. Margins are top, bottom, left, and right — until you turn on facing pages, at which point they become inner and outer, and swap sides on alternate pages the way a bound book does. Inner margins run wider than outer because the binding eats into them; that asymmetry is most of what makes a page look typeset rather than typed.
Bleed is the sliver of artwork past the trim line that printers ask for so ink reaches the cut edge. It defaults to the print-on-demand standard, and it’s harmless for digital output — set it and forget it.
Body typography
Typeface, size in points, line height, and paragraph spacing for the body of the finished book. One distinction carries this whole section: this is not the font you draft in.
The editor’s font is a preference of yours. The book’s font is a property of the book. Keeping them separate is what lets you write in something large and comfortable at midnight and export in Garamond 11 — neither ever disturbs the other.
Chapter openings
Every chapter opening follows one set of rules rather than being laid out by hand: whether the number shows and in what style — Chapter One, Chapter 1, or the bare numeral — whether the title and subtitle appear, how they align, and how far down the page the text begins.
That last control is the one designers reach for first. Printed chapters traditionally start a third of the way down the page, and that single percentage is most of the difference between a document and a book. Part title pages for acts follow the same pattern, and can be turned off entirely.
The point of rules over hand-layout: chapter twelve can’t drift out of step with chapter two, because neither was laid out individually in the first place.
Headers, footers, and page numbers
Running heads get three slots each — left, center, right — filled with your own text or tokens like the book title and the page number. With facing pages on they can mirror across the spread, author on the verso and title on the recto, the way tradition has it. And the first page of a chapter can be left bare, which nearly every printed book does and nearly every word processor doesn’t.
Scene dividers
The mark between scenes inside a chapter: * * * by default, anything you type instead, or nothing at all for a blank-line break. There’s also an option to start every scene on its own page — wrong for most novels, right for some non-fiction, and standard for screenplays.
Seeing it while you write
Here is where the design stops being abstract. Switch the editor to page view and you are looking at your format applied to your manuscript — real margins, real running heads, real page breaks. It runs the same pagination as the PDF export, so the page count on screen is the page count of the book.
Adjust a margin, watch the text reflow, decide. No exporting a test PDF every ten minutes; the test PDF is the view you’re writing in.
Formats and presets, kept straight
One distinction worth pinning down, because the words sound alike. A format is the book’s design, and lives with the project. A preset is an export configuration — contents, style, file type, processing — and lives in the Compile window from the last post.
They compose: the same trade-paperback project can go out as a double-spaced submission manuscript without its format changing, because the export style overrides the design for that file only. Design once, export any which way.
A word on screenplays
Screenplay projects trade paragraph styling for element formatting — scene headings, action, character cues, dialogue, parentheticals, transitions, with Enter and Tab moving between them. The Screenplay format applies the industry metrics: Courier 12, the standard indents, one page to roughly one minute of screen time. Export adds (MORE) and (CONT’D) across page breaks and a proper title page. If you write scripts, the format has already made every layout decision the industry expects.
Every control here is documented in the Book design reference. Next in the series: the pages around the manuscript — title pages, dedications, and covers. Until then, the fastest way to learn your format is to open page view and change one thing.