Read a folder as one document

Some things are one document that happens to live in many files: a manuscript, a handbook, a long report with a file per section.

Flow view reads a whole folder as one continuous document, in order — and gives you two other ways to look at the same set of sections.

Opening it

Right-click a folder and choose Arrange by hand. Open Flow view then appears directly beneath it, and opens the folder as a document.

The order is the reason for that first step. A folder sorted by date is a document whose chapters reshuffle themselves every time you edit one, so Flow view is only offered where the order is a decision you’ve made.

Every markdown note in the folder appears one after another, including notes in subfolders, in the order you’ve arranged them.

Three ways to look

Buttons in the header switch between them. They’re the same sections each time, at different distances:

• Outline — every section as a row, with its synopsis. The one for seeing the shape of the whole thing.
• Cards — index cards you can rearrange.
• Flow — the whole folder as one document, to read.

In Outline and Cards you can drag to reorder the whole thing — which reorders the underlying files, not just the view. This is the bit that makes it more than a preview. Restructuring a long piece becomes dragging in a list rather than renaming files.

Outline and Cards both have a control for how much of each synopsis to show — hide it, one line, or all of it — and Cards has a card size.

Clicking a row in Outline or Cards switches to Flow and lands you at that section.

The outline reorders the real files when you drag it.

Flow is read-only

Deliberately. Flow view is for reading and rearranging; to edit a section, double-click its title and it opens in the editor beside. When you’re done, the flow re-renders.

The reason is honest: one live editor per section would mean a dozen independent save-and-sync paths on screen at once, which is a good way to lose work.

Exporting

Export the whole thing as one file, in one of five formats:

• PDF — paginated, ready to print or send. Desktop only.
• Rich Text (.rtf) — opens in Word, Pages and Google Docs with the formatting intact. Not a .docx.
• Web page (.html) — one self-contained file, images and recordings included.
• Markdown (.md) — everything concatenated.
• Plain text (.txt) — prose only; headings and lists survive, markup doesn’t.

For the three formats that carry any formatting, a Styling picker sets what it looks like: Print default, Current formatting (whatever Appearance is set to right now), or any theme you’ve saved. Themes are looked up by name when you export, so a theme you’ve edited since exports as it is now. The plain-text formats don’t offer the picker, because there’d be nothing for it to do.

Rich Text carries less than the other two — sizes, weights and colours, but not line width, list guidelines or callout backgrounds. The dialog says so under the picker.

You can save the whole set of choices as a preset and pick it again next time.

Ordering

The order comes from your manual folder arrangement — drag notes in the sidebar, or in Outline or Cards, to change it. That order is stored with the vault, so it travels and syncs.