The Notebook File Structure

One of the most important features of PieceWorx Writing Studio is the open file structure which uses common standards.

The reason this is important--and this may sound unlikely coming from the creator of PieceWorx Writing Studio--is that you do not need PieceWorx Writing Studio to get access to you content.

I very rarely purchase a software program from a company for work I could spend thousands of hours creating unless I know I could still get to my content without the program. All sorts of things can happen with technology that could cause a program to stop working. One of the most common scenarios is upgrading your operating system.

If that company goes out of business and their file type is proprietary, then I have lost all of my work.

With PieceWorx Writing Studio you always have access to your files!

Open Standards

The .nbook file type is really just a zip file. All you need to do to see the insides of the file is to append the .zip extension to the end of the notebook filename.

Most modern operating systems, including Windows, allow you to explore .zip files the same way you would explore the regular file system.

Additionally, inside of the .nbook file, all of your content pages are stored as RTF files, possibly the most widely supported type of word processing document besides pure text. Any popular word processing program can read your RTF content files.

Inside the Notebook File

Top-Level Folders

In the following screen capture, I am looking at the inside of the notebook file using just the Windows operating system. All I had to do was rename MyNotebook2.nbook to MyNotebook2.nbook.zip.

You can see two top-level folders inside the file named Content and System. The Content folder is where all of your created pages reside. The System folder is for settings and other files needed by PieceWorx Writing Studio to do its job.

System Folder

Drilling down into the system folder we can see some of the files it contains which include custom dictionary files, user defined quick fonts, other user settings and the very important Index.xml file which contains information about each of your pages.

I recommend that you do not modify any of these files unless you understand what you are doing and have backups of your notebook file. Also, things can change between program versions, so a hack that might have worked in version 1.0 may not continue to work in 2.0.

You will likely never have a need to modify these files and probably don't even care, but I'm sure there are others like me who enjoy knowing what goes on behind the scenes. (Get it? Scenes. Like scenes in your novel? ... Awww, come on. That was funny!).

Content Folder

In the screen capture below you can see your content files stored as RTF documents. The file names contain both the name you assigned in PieceWorx Writing Studio and a trailing number which is used internally for managing the files. The files and folders reflect the hierarchical structure of your notebook.

When you are done exploring the notebook file, remember to remove the .zip extension from the file name so that PieceWorx Writing Studio will be able to open it. It must have .nbook as the last extension in order to be opened by PieceWorx Writing Studio.