Exporting has two jobs, and they deserve to be kept apart in your head.
The first is publishing: turning the manuscript into a file someone else will read — a DOCX for an editor, a PDF for a proof, an EPUB for a reader. The second is insurance: a copy of your work that exists outside any one tool, including this one. Charc does both from the same window, and this post walks through all of it.
One window
File → Compile & Export opens everything in one place: a live preview of the actual pages on the left, what goes into the file in the middle, and how it’s made down the right.
The preview deserves a sentence of emphasis: it is not an approximation. It runs the same pagination as the exported PDF — same pages, same count — which means you know how long your book is before you export anything, and what you see is what a reader gets.
Choosing what goes in
Your book appears as its outline — acts, chapters, scenes — each with a checkbox. The whole novel is one state of that list. Three chapters for a workshop is another. A single scene for a single reader is a third, and all of them take seconds.
Front matter is its own column, and so are your characters, settings, and charts. That last part matters more than it sounds: tick the entities instead of the manuscript and what comes out is a series bible — the knowledge base from the last post, exported as a document of its own.
The page design
Style sets what the page itself looks like — trim size, margins, typography — in one pick. The industry trim sizes are here: trade paperback, digest, mass market, large print. So are a proper screenplay layout, two classic manuscript looks for submission, and Chicago, MLA, and APA for academic work.
Two styles behave differently on purpose: Outline and Characters hand you a document of that material rather than the manuscript — a printable outline, or a character bible, straight from what you’ve already written.
File formats
Word and PDF cover editors and proofs. A print-ready PDF with bleed exists for the printer’s spec sheet. EPUB covers e-readers, straight-to-print covers your own printer, and HTML, Markdown, and plain text cover everything downstream that isn’t a book yet. Screenplay projects add Fountain, the plain-text screenplay interchange format — nothing you write in Charc is locked in.
And then there’s Charc Backup, at the bottom of the list, which is not a publishing format at all. More on it below, because it’s the most important item in this post.
Seeing it as a reader will
Before exporting an EPUB, preview it the way it will actually be read: in a device frame — phone, tablet, or e-reader — with your book reflowing at that screen size instead of sitting on a fixed page.
It’s a reading check, not a layout check. An ebook has no fixed pages, so the question is never “does page 90 look right” — it’s whether chapter openings, scene breaks, and images survive being poured into a different container. Two minutes in the preview answers it.
Presets
A preset is the entire configuration in one click: what’s included, the style, the file type, the processing. The built-in ones cover the common destinations. The Save button covers you — set the window up the way your workflow needs and keep it as your own. “The workshop packet” or “agent submission” becomes one click instead of eleven.
Include and Processing
Include decides what the file carries beyond the prose: chapter numbers and subtitles, scene titles, synopses, headers and footers, endnotes, footnotes, a bibliography. This is where a manuscript for an editor (synopses on, headers on) diverges from a reader copy (both off) without touching the book itself.
Processing handles the conventions publishers ask for and nobody wants to do by hand: curly quotes straightened, italics rendered as underlines, double hyphens turned into real em dashes — plus your own find-and-replace rules, applied at export so the manuscript itself stays clean.
The copy that isn’t for readers
Inside Charc, your work is already protected in layers — automatic saves as you write, snapshots you take deliberately before big changes, sync to your account. The Snapshots & backups reference covers all four nets.
A Charc Backup export is the layer outside all of that: the whole project in one file — manuscript, outline, entities, front matter, settings — restorable completely. It is the copy that doesn’t depend on your browser, your account, or us.
So here is the one habit this series will insist on: export a backup at every milestone. Finished a chapter? Ten seconds. Ending a writing week? Ten seconds. It is the cheapest insurance a manuscript can have, and the writers who need it are always the ones who didn’t. During an alpha, doubly so — we protect your work with everything described above, and you should still hold a copy that’s entirely yours.
Every switch in the window is documented in the Export & publishing reference. Go export something — even just to see your page count.