Export

Are you done writing, ready to show your words to the world? Ulysses lets you export easily to a host of standard formats, share your texts via Messages or Mail, even publish directly to a WordPress blog or a Medium account. Here’s an overview.

On Mac

When working with Ulysses for Mac, these are the ways to get to export your sheets:

Use the Export button top right in the editor to export the current sheet (1).
In the library or the sheet list, right-click on a sheet, a group, or even a filter, and select Preview from the context menu (2).
Also, you can simply hit the shortcut ⇧⌘P (shift-command-P).

You can also export multiple sheets at once: just hold ⇧ (shift) while selecting them in the sheet list.

This will open the export preview. At the top center, you can switch to the desired format of your output. This can be Text, HTML, ePub, PDF, DOCX, or, if you want to upload your text to a WordPress or Ghost blog or to Medium, Publishing.

Below the format switcher, you can specify the export settings, depending on the previously selected format. You can, for example, choose an export style and a page size when your output is going to be a PDF document.

The icons top right represent the available export actions:

Save to…, to open Finder and save to a location of your choice
Open in…, lists all available applications for further processing of your output
Share… your output via Airdrop, send as mail or iMessage, or print it

You can, for example, send a DOCX file as a mail attachment, or open an ePub file instantly in Books.

If you select Publishing as export format, a Publish button will appear top right in the exporter.

At the top left of the export preview you can see a button that displays the number of exported sheets, groups or filters – this is the Reveal button. If you have several export previews open at the same time, it will quickly take you back to the right sheet, group or filter.

On iPad or iPhone

Here are three ways to invoke Quick Export when working on an iPad or iPhone:

To export your current sheet, tap the circled ellipsis in the editor and select Export (1).
In the library or the sheet list, touch and hold a group or a sheet and select Export from the list of available actions (2).
To manually select the sheets to export, go to the sheet list, tap the circled ellipsis top right, choose “Select Sheets…”, mark the sheets in question, tap the circled ellipsis top left and select Export (3).

Any of these actions will directly bring up a preview of your output.

Now, tap the specified format at the top (1) to select an export format, e.g., HTML, ePub, PDF, DOCX, Plain Text or Publishing (2). Then, tap the brush icon to select the export style and paper format (3).

By tapping the share icon top right (1) you can now select between the available export actions (2). By and large, these are the same as on Mac, depending on the selected format and the apps installed on your iOS device: You can send your works to friends or coworkers (3), open them in other apps, copy them to your clipboard or upload them to iCloud Drive or another sync service.

Export Settings

Let’s quickly glance at the export settings available for each format.

PDF/DOCX

While the PDF and DOCX exporters produce either a PDF file or a Word document, they share the same settings. On the one hand, you can choose a style for defining the details of your document’s layout. Ulysses comes with a couple of built-in styles for that purpose. For a wider choice, browse Ulysses’ Style Exchange. On the other hand, you can define the page size of your document.

ePub

When exporting to ePub, you can set an author name, a title and select a cover image for your ebook. Also, you can select a formatting style, albeit the ePub format, in comparison to PDF and DOCX, technically leaves fewer options for an individual layout.

HTML

HTML export will interpret Markdown tags as HTML code. Select between Snippet to quickly copy-paste to an existing website, and “Full Page” to create a complete HTML document, including header, body, CSS links and so on.

Text

With Text export, you can select between Plain Text, Rich Text, Markdown, TextBundle and TextPack. Plain Text will strip out all of your markup tags, while Rich Text will convert them and produce an RTF file with WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) formatting. Markdown and TextBundle will both include Markdown formatting during export, but TextBundle can also take your images along.

Publishing

When selecting Publishing, you will be able to switch between your Ghost, Medium and WordPress accounts – given you connected them first to Ulysses, of course. You can connect as many accounts as you want. Once this is done, it will take you just a few clicks/taps to upload your articles, complete with images. For more details, read our articles about publishing to Ghost, Medium and WordPress.

Export and Material Sheets

Sometimes, you might want to exclude a sheet from the export because it contains information that is not meant to become part of your final text. In this case, you can mark the sheet as material. Material sheets are easy to recognize thanks to a visual marker in the sheet list.

On Mac, you can create a new material sheet or convert an existing regular sheet into one (“Use as Material Sheet”) via the File menu.

On iPad or iPhone, go to the library and create a new material sheet via the + icon. To convert a regular sheet, open the sheet list, touch and hold the sheet and select “Use as Material Sheet”.

Now, when you export several sheets or a group, only regular sheets will be exported. You can, however, export single material sheets.