User Guide / v1.0.0

Focus on your writing. Get a document ready to publish.

draft2final is a professional typesetting engine built for writers who want to stay focused on content while demanding polished, publication-grade output.

The Philosophy

Traditional word processors force you to fight margins, font sizes, and hidden formatting while you are trying to write. draft2final reverses this. You write in Markdown and the engine handles high-fidelity layout.

  • Form: the structural nature of your work, such as manuscript, screenplay, or academic.
  • Aesthetic: the visual skin or style, such as classic, default, or novel.

Installation

To make draft2final available as a global command:

npm install -g draft2final

Or run it instantly without installation:

npx draft2final --help

Getting Started

Do not start with a blank page. Let the tool scaffold a professional template and render the result once you have written your draft.

# For a novel or memoir
draft2final --new story.md --as manuscript

# For a film script
draft2final --new script.md --as screenplay
# Render with default settings
draft2final story.md

# Render as a specific type
draft2final story.md --as manuscript

Choosing Your Form

Use the --as flag, or as: in frontmatter, to choose the structural form of your work.

  • manuscript: for fiction and long prose submissions, including chapter headers, paragraph indentation, and scene breaks.
  • screenplay: for scene headings, action, character cues, dialogue blocks, and dual dialogue.
  • academic: for research drafts and formal papers with precise, readable layout.
  • literature: for poetry and literary prose where white space and cadence matter.
  • markdown: for handbooks, reports, and technical writing.

Aesthetics and Styles

The --style flag lets you choose the visual skin of your document without touching your text.

draft2final story.md --as manuscript --style classic

You can also set this in your file frontmatter:

---
title: The Last Orchard
as: manuscript
style: default
---

Multilingual Native

draft2final includes a font-matching engine that fetches and caches high-fidelity OpenType fonts on demand. Whether you are mixing English with Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, or Thai, the engine handles contextual shaping and bidirectional layout without broken glyphs — no plugins, no workarounds.

Syntax Cheat Sheet

Feature Manuscript Screenplay
Title page # Title # Title followed by author lines
Major header ## Chapter Name ## INT. SCENE
Sub header ### Scene Label ### TRANSITION:
Break --- for a symbol break --- for an action beat
Dialogue N/A > @CHAR