iA Writer

hi, I was wondering whether someone might give me an idea what to expect from the focus mode of this app? Does it work with VoiceOver, and if so, how?

I, too, wonder about it. Also, anybody tried 1Writer? IAwriter and 1Writer have been on my radar.K

depending on the area in the focus view, that is very much not the same thing. Not to mention not everyone has access to a braille display, or wishes to use one.

I'm writing an in depth review of this app and wondering whether people are also seeing frequent voiceOver crashes? This is happening both when writing in braille screen input and while using the standard touch screen keyboard. @

They built the Windows version without any thought to accessibility, so I would need to use LibreOffice or NotePad++ or the like for when shifting from IPad to laptop. Are files in the library plain text .md files that are visible and openable from ICloud Drive, or are they locked in a library archive the way Ulysses does? I don't want to have to export, since I'll be doing it a whole lot, and it seems like the edit-in-place function may also be a bit cumbersome, but somebody can comment on that.
Do bold, italics, etc. work with the VO text navigation custom commands that were recently added? I've read that IA Writer renders them rather than displaying the *markdown* codes for them.
[Update: I plunked down my lunch money on IA Writer to answer my own questions. The library is visible and accessible on ICloudDrive for Windows and other apps. Only issue is that, like VoiceDream Writer and most of these text editors, the files are encoded as UTF-8 with no byte-order mark (BOM). That's great, but Windows uses a different code page by default, which will often make things like curly quotes and international characters turn into garbage when opening one of these files. The latest version of Notepad will open it fine, and Word will prompt for the proper encoding , with UTF-8 as the default, but both will add a BOM when saving the file. That's fine too, but IA Writer will just strip those bytes out again when opening the file. Not a big deal. NotePad++ leaves the file alone and works fine. Jarte needs the file translated to UTF-8 BOM before it can open it, as does LibreOffice. So that's the scoop on moving files between IA Writer and Windows, FWIW.
As for focus mode, I'm with Zoe: exactly the same text remains on the screen regardless of what I set focus mode to, so I don't know what's up with that.
As for my question about bold and italic, turns out that's just on the Preview screen, which is a function I don't find useful because VoiceOver will treat bold and italic text, along with anything else wrapped in a tag, as a separate item, which breaks up the reading of sentences. I haven't ever missed not using the markdown preview, though, since having the formatting codes right there in the text is what I like about markdown in the first place. The only thing I don't believe is accessible in the app is the search function, which is a shame because it has the capacity to parse regexpressions--a very powerful way to search. But the VO search works. The reason to use this app over something slightly cheaper is the ability to export to formatted pdfs and html, including selecting some text and copying that to the clipboard as html, which ByWord also does. IA Writer allows custom templates for the output, like Scriviner and Ulysses and PanDoc. Just like those other options, though, it's a fairly complex endeavor to write CSS and JavaScript if you want to go beyond the basic options on the app's template UI. If someone didn't need to publish to the Web or PDFs a lot, I sort of think VoiceDream Writer is a more pleasant experience overall.]

I am still noticing a lot of crashes, especially with documents of over 1000 words. Are other people seeing this as well?

I will say I like the preview function of this app very much for getting a sense of how my text reads "by paragraph.

Often when switching out of braille screen input to the text field, when typing on the touchscreen, or sometimes when touching the text field.

Apologies, it is not the app that is crashing, but VoiceOver.

Hi. I'm wondering whether folders are a planned feature of this app. I'd love to be able to organize different folders for fiction, blogs, work writing, etc.