There are many details in Ulysses that you can adjust according to your likes and preferences, allowing you to create a writing environment fit for your creativity. Below, you’ll find a step-by-step guide to customize your text editor on iPad or iPhone. If you want to know how to do this on Mac, please head over to this article.
Ulysses’ default is D22, a simple and clean theme that combines a monochrome tint with classic revision colors. You can also choose one of the other pre-installed – carefully designed – themes. Each of them comes with a light and a dark version.
If these are not yet what you are looking for, you can go to Ulysses Styles & Themes and select between a variety of themes created by fellow users.
Here’s how:
What do you prefer – Light Mode or Dark Mode? It depends, right? In Ulysses you can either adopt the appearance settings of your device or set an app-specific mode.
Your default writing font is the iOS system font, San Francisco. It is undoubtedly an excellent choice, but you can always browse the other available fonts and choose your favorite. You’ll find them in the settings under Font.
You can also upload and use your own, here’s how to do it:
Text Zoom, Line Height, Paragraph Spacing, First Line Indent… adjust them under Editor, in the editor settings.
Let’s assume you need less space between lines, or you think they are too far apart. Try changing the Line Height. Or do you feel your paragraphs are too close together? Then alter the Paragraph Spacing. When you wish to signal the start of a new paragraph distinctly, customize the First Line Indent. And last but not least, increase or decrease the text size in Text Zoom. Try it out and find your preferred look!
Under “View Options” you can tweak the size of image previews to anything between three and eight lines, and choose to show them in full color (instead of black and white, which is the default). You can also turn off image previews completely; images in the text will then be indicated with a little tag.
On iPad, there are two additional settings under “View Options”. Usually, the editor toolbar will fade out as soon as you start typing — if you activate “Always Show Toolbar”, you can prevent it from doing so.
Also, did you notice the floating counter at the top right? It lets you access comprehensive statistics about your current sheet, with metrics ranging from characters to paragraphs to reading aloud time. However, if you’re not so much into numbers, you can turn it off under “View Options”.
Do you want to focus on your text and nothing but your text? On your iPad, you can use the full-screen mode to hide the toolbars and even the shortcut row if a hardware keyboard is attached. To enter full-screen mode, tap the circled ellipsis and select “Full Screen”.. To exit full-screen mode, tap the circled ellipsis again and choose “End Full Screen”.
To adjust the viewing of your sheets, switch to the sheet list, open the sheet list menu via the circled ellipsis and tap Preview. You can set the preview to anything between one and six lines. Also, you can opt to hide the creation/modification date of your sheets, if it is not relevant to your writing.
You’re on a deadline and want to focus exclusively on a particular project? Forget about anything else? Then you may find the group focus feature helpful. To hide all groups except the one you’re currently working on, just touch and hold the group in question and select Focus.
When you’re done and want to show the other groups again, touch and hold the group again and select Unfocus.
