The Editor

The Editor shows your document as pages, just like Word, with the toolbar above and the Editor chat beside it. Whatever you change is saved to the document itself, with a version history behind it.

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Find your way around

The Editor has five areas.

1. Title bar: the project › Drafting › the document’s name. Drafting takes you back to the Drafting page, and the name opens the document menu. On the right: the save status, Save, History and Publish.
2. Toolbar: formatting in two rows, ending in the Editing / Suggesting switch explained in Collaboration.
3. Page: your document, laid out as pages, with comments and suggestions in the margin on the right.
4. Right panel: three tabs, Chat, Comments & Suggestions and Sources. Page setup and History open here too, and ✕ closes it. The chat bubble at the bottom right brings it back.
5. Bottom bar: the page you’re on, the word count (or the count for your selection) and zoom.

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Format the document

The toolbar works the way you know from Word. Settings for the whole document, such as margins and columns, live in the Formatting panel.

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Text and paragraphs

The toolbar groups its controls from left to right. In a narrow window the groups fold into menus one at a time, from the right, but nothing disappears.

1. Undo and redo, Clear formatting and Format painter.
2. Settings: Page setup, which opens the Formatting panel, and Ruler.
3. Text: font, size, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, subscript, superscript, text colour and highlight.
4. Paragraph: bulleted and numbered lists, indents, Show marks, alignment and line spacing.
5. Styles: Theme and the paragraph style.
6. Insert: table, break, footnote, image and link.

Format painter copies formatting, as in Word. Put the caret in the text whose look you want, click the brush, then click a word or drag across text to paint it. Double-click the brush to paint several places; Esc stops it. Clear formatting works the same way and resets text to the document’s default style.

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Text styles

The paragraph style menu works like Word’s style gallery. Each style shows in its own look, and the one you’re in has a tick.

1. The styles. The arrow next to each offers Apply with its shortcut, such as ⌘⌥2 for Heading 2, Update … to match, which redefines the style from the paragraph you’re in, and Rename.
2. New style adds one of your own.
3. Options: Save as my default styles, Use my default styles and Reset styles.

If the Word file brought its own styles, they’re listed under Document styles. To delete a style or add it to your theme, see Apply and change a theme.

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Lists and legal numbering

Numbered lists come with presets for legal documents. Open the arrow next to Numbered list, choose the jurisdiction at the top, then a preset.

1. The jurisdiction: Germany, Switzerland, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia or the European Union.
2. The presets for that jurisdiction, each with its pattern. Decimal Contract (International) runs 1. → 1.1. → 1.1.1. → (a) → (i), and the German Statute / Legislative runs § 1 → (1) → 1. → a) → aa).

The numbering is real list numbering, not typed characters. Insert a clause above 4.2 and it becomes 4.3 by itself.

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Page setup

Page setup in the toolbar opens the Formatting panel on the right. Changes apply to the whole document straight away.

1. Page: paper size and orientation, margins with presets such as DIN 5008 letterhead, a binding gutter, and mirrored margins for double-sided printing.
2. Colors & Typography: the theme’s colours and text styles. See Apply and change a theme.
3. Columns: one, two or three columns with spacing and a divider, and Line numbers for briefs.
4. Header & Footer: header and footer distance, a different first page or odd and even pages, and page numbers.

Undo (⌘Z) doesn’t reverse page setup, but Reset changes at the bottom of the panel does. Save as theme, next to it, turns your settings into a theme. Line numbers can restart on each page and skip styles such as headings. A Word file with several sections keeps them, each with its own headers and footers. Saving changes only what you edited, so Word’s compare shows your edits and nothing else.

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Tables, images, footnotes and breaks

Insert, at the right end of the toolbar, adds a table, a break, a footnote, an image or a link. Click inside a table and its own toolbar appears above it.

1. Hide table borders, which keeps the grid invisible in Word too.
2. Insert a column to the left or right, or delete one.
3. Insert a row above or below, or delete one.
4. Merge cells and Split cell.
5. Delete table.

• Images: PNG, JPEG, SVG and other common formats, up to 20 MB. Click an image to resize it or change its Text wrapping.
• Footnotes: Insert footnote adds a numbered footnote at the bottom of the page and renumbers the rest. Footnotes with tables, lists or tracked changes open read-only.
• Breaks: a line break (Shift+Enter), a page break (Ctrl+Enter), or a column break (Ctrl+Shift+Enter) in a multi-column layout.

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Work with Libra in the Editor chat

The Chat tab is the same chat you use everywhere in Libra, with its tools, research and Assistants. The difference: it works on the document you have open, including edits you haven’t saved, and changes it in place instead of writing a new file. It can still write new files: Draft document and Build spreadsheet in Tools create a Word document or an Excel sheet from the one you have open.

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Scoped changes

Select a passage before you ask, and Libra changes that passage only. The chat box shows a Selected Text chip with the word count, and Libra still reads the whole document for context. This is a scoped change. With clause 7.1 on minor repairs selected, “Make this more favourable to the tenant.” rewrites 7.1 and nothing else. To drop the selection, clear the chip with ×. In Editing mode, Libra’s changes go straight into the document, and the chat reports them on a card such as Libra changed 1 passage. Show changes steps through them on the page, with Revert and Revert all in the bar at the bottom. The card’s undo icon, Revert changes, takes back everything from that answer. Before Libra’s first change in a session, the Editor also saves a Before Libra’s changes version to Version history.

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Research in the Editor

Switch on research sources in the chat box, as in any research chat, and ask about the clause you’ve selected. Libra answers in the chat, with citations to the sources it used.

1. The selected clause, here 9.1 on the landlord’s liability
2. The research sources switched on in the chat box, here German Statutes and German Case Law
3. A citation to one of those sources
4. The Sources tab

The Sources tab lists the sources behind Libra’s latest answer. The chip under an answer, such as 04 research sources, opens the list for that answer. To act on an answer, keep the clause selected and ask for the change: “Rewrite this clause so it holds up under § 307 BGB.”

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Your document chats

Each document keeps its own chat history, separately for each user, and your chats stay private when you share the draft. The ⋯ menu at the right end of the tab row has Chat History, to search earlier conversations, New Chat, for a fresh one about the same document, and Show fullscreen, which continues the conversation in the main chat.

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Save, publish and restore

Saving keeps your work. Publishing decides what everyone else sees.

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Save

The Editor saves automatically 30 seconds after your last edit. Save in the title bar (⌘S) saves straight away as a named version, and comments and suggestions save the moment you add them. The status next to Save reads Saved, Saving… or Unsaved changes. The arrow next to Save also offers Save as template, see From a draft.

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Publish

Publish saves and makes that version the one your team finds. It’s available after the first save. Who sees which version: If Libra gives an outdated answer about a draft in another chat, publish it. Right after an upload, Publish waits until Libra has read the document: Preparing this document. You can publish it once it is ready. Drafts you haven’t published carry a tag on the Drafting page, in Project files and in the file picker:

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Version history

History in the title bar lists the saved versions: the Current version, numbered versions, any Before Libra’s changes version and the Starting point, which is the document before its first edit in the Editor. Hover a version for View, Restore, Download and the pin that keeps it. Restoring never loses anything, because your current content is kept as a version too. A restored version isn’t published until you click Publish. The Editor keeps the newest 20 versions, plus the starting point and any version you pin.

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Download and print

Click the document’s name in the title bar to open the document menu. Download saves what’s on screen as a .docx, and Print prints it. There’s no PDF export; save the .docx as a PDF in Word. In a team, the menu also has Share, see Share a draft.

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Common use cases

The Editor chat can do your formatting too. Ask with nothing selected, since page setup applies to the whole document. Stay in Editing mode, since Suggesting refuses page setup and changes to a table’s structure.

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Next steps