Stendhal Book Editing Guide: Pages, Copy/Paste, Import/Export, and Saving

guide

Stendhal gives you a full set of book editing tools, all reached through its interface and hotkeys rather than any crafting recipe. The controls below cover page handling, clipboard-style memory operations, disk import and export, and clearing content from books, pages, and signs.

Page and Book Controls

Each of these actions is triggered from the Stendhal interface. Where a control has its own hotkey, bind it yourself in the controls menu.

Clear Book Content — wipes every page in the book, leaving it empty.
Clear Page Content — removes everything written on the current page.
Paste Page Content — drops the page you previously stored in memory into the book.
Create a blank page after this one — inserts a fresh, empty page directly following the current one.
Remove this page from the book, shifting the others accordingly — deletes the current page and closes the gap so later pages move up.

Copying and Pasting

Stendhal keeps two kinds of memory: one for whole books, tied to the world you are in, and one for individual pages.

Copy the pages in memory for this world — stores all pages of the book in world-specific memory.
Paste the pages in memory in the book — writes those stored pages back into the book.
Copy the content and style of the page in memory — saves the current page, including its formatting.
Paste the content and style of the page from memory — restores that page with its formatting intact.

There is also a text-level paste: Paste the content of your clipboard at the caret position inserts whatever is on your system clipboard right where the cursor sits.

Text and Style Tools

While editing text inside a page, these options are available:

Paste the content of your clipboard at the caret position — inserts clipboard text at the cursor.
Reset the style after the caret position ($r) — clears formatting from the cursor onward.
Remove all the style and only keep the text — strips formatting from the content, leaving plain text.
Switch between colors and unicodes list — toggles the picker between color choices and unicode characters.

Importing and Exporting Books

Books can be moved to and from disk.

Import a book from the disk — loads a saved book file into the game.
Export a book on the disk — writes the current book out as a file.

Two settings tell you where those files live:

Saved Books folder: — the directory used for book files.
Saved Signs folder: — the directory used for sign files.

Two error messages can appear when saving a book:

Please enter a title of atleast 3 characters. — the title you typed is too short.
A book with the same name has already been saved before. — a file with that name already exists.

Signs

Signs have a parallel set of controls:

Clear Sign Content — removes all text from the sign.
Copy the sign content in memory for this world — stores the sign's text in world-specific memory.
Paste the sign content in memory for this world — writes that stored text back onto a sign.
Export a sign on the disk — saves the sign to a file.
Import a sign from the disk — loads a sign file.

When a sign finishes loading, you get confirmation: Sign Loaded from Disk with the subtitle Your Sign has been loaded! The follow-up instruction reads: Please edit the sign again and use 'Paste Sign' button. In other words, after importing, reopen the sign for editing and apply the paste action to place the loaded content.

Practical Notes

Bind the actions you use most in the controls menu, since Stendhal does not assign fixed keys to them here. Book memory is per-world, so pages copied in one world are not the same store as pages copied in another. Keep titles at three characters or more, and use distinct names to avoid the duplicate-name error when exporting.