Bulk Edits and Stamps

Change many pages at once — and keep the change, if it is one you will make again. Most tidying is not one page at a time: a finished project needs twenty pages archived, an import needs filing, a stack of reading needs marking as read. And a few of those changes come round every month, in exactly the same shape. A stamp remembers one so you never have to reconstruct it.

What people use them for

• Closing a project. Tag the pages archive, set Status to Done, give them the Reference type. Save that as Wrap up a project and the next one is a single press instead of three decisions you have to remember in order.
• Filing what arrived overnight. A batch of clippings or imported files lands untyped and untagged. One stamp — Type: Source, tag: inbox — and it is filed.
• Triage. Select the six books you actually started and set Status to Reading in one go.
• Undoing a decision. You tagged forty pages draft last month and want it gone. Removing a tag is a bulk action too.

Selecting pages

In the Pages palette, turn on Select. Tap pages to add them to the selection — All takes everything currently listed, None clears it. Because All takes what is listed, the palette's own search and filters are how you aim: filter down to what you mean, press All, and the selection is exactly that.

The things you can do to a selection

A row of actions appears above the pages as soon as one is selected:

• + Tag and − Remove tag… — add or take away a tag across all of them.
• Set type… and Clear type — give them all a Page Type, or take it off.
• Kind… — say what they all ARE in one go, or put them back to no kind. See Page Kinds.
• ⊙ Property… — choose one of your properties and give it a value for every selected page. Leave the value empty and it clears that property instead, which is the fastest way to undo a field you filled in too eagerly.
• Move to… and ＋ New folder… — refile them, into a folder that need not exist yet.
• + ToC — add them to the table of contents, in the order shown.
• ⧉ Longform — stack them into one editable document. ✦ Synthesize… — read across them. 🗑 Delete — to Recently Deleted, after a confirmation.

Keeping one as a stamp

Tag, retype or set a property and a new button appears: ❖ Save as stamp, counting what you have done so far. (Those are the changes a stamp remembers — moving pages, adding them to the table of contents and the rest happen once, to the pages you picked, and are not recorded.) Do two more and it counts three. Name it, and the sequence is kept — in the document, so it travels with it.

From then on, select any pages and choose your stamp from ❖ Stamp…. It presses the same steps onto them in the same order. Each saved stamp shows how many steps it carries, so you can tell Wrap up a project (3) from Mark as read (1) at a glance. Forget a stamp… in the same menu removes one you have finished with.

It tells you what happened: Stamped 14 pages, or Nothing to change — they already match. That second message matters. A stamp that finds everything already in the state it wants has done nothing, and saying nothing at all would read as a failure.

Why there is no stamp editor

You cannot write a stamp from scratch, and that is deliberate rather than unfinished. A stamp is recorded, never authored. The only things it can contain are things you already did by hand, one at a time, watching them happen — so there is nothing in a stamp that has not already been tested on real pages in front of you. That is what makes it reasonable to press one onto fifty pages at once.

It also means a stamp has no language to learn, no conditions, and no way to express something you could not do yourself. It is a memory of your own actions, not a small program.

Things worth knowing

• The recording follows the selection. Clear the selection, or leave Select mode, and what you had done so far is forgotten. Save the stamp before you move on.
• A stamp is not a rule. It changes the pages you press it onto, then and there. It does not keep watching, and pages made later are not affected. If you want a shape that stays true by itself, that is Page Kinds instead.
• Order is kept, because occasionally it matters — a stamp that sets a property and then retypes the pages replays exactly that way round.
• Everything a stamp does is ordinary. Nothing it changes is special or hidden, so anything it did can be undone the same way you would undo it by hand.