Page Styles

Give a wiki its own look, and change it in one place. Write a style once — a source card, a stance label, a highlighted quote, a banded table — put it on any page by name, and every page that wears it follows when you change your mind. The look belongs to the wiki, so it travels with it: into exports, onto a share, into a copy you hand a colleague, and out again as a file somebody else can use.

It is not a theme. A theme is how MojoPad looks to you on this Mac. Page styles are how this wiki's pages look to everyone who opens it, and they are part of the document.

What people use them for

Every source the same shape, so a quote is never mistaken for your own words. A researcher gives each paper a Source card — title, authors, where it was published, a stance label, and the passage they copied out, sitting on its own highlighted ground. Six months later there is no question on any page about which words were the paper's and which were theirs, because the answer is visible rather than remembered.
A wiki that still reads like yours when it lands on somebody else's Mac. You send a project wiki to a colleague who runs a different theme and has never seen your cards. It opens looking the way it looks here, because the look came with it. So does the shared copy on the web server, the PDF, and the published site.
A house look saved once and used again next year. A lab settles on how a source card should look. That look is saved as one small file, and every wiki anyone in the lab starts from then on begins with it — including next year's, which nobody has thought of yet.
A wiki somebody sent you that shouts. Somebody's look is not your look: the colors are loud, the labels are enormous, and you only want to read. One menu item shows that wiki's pages plain, on your Mac only, and nothing in the wiki can undo it.

Your first source card, in about a minute

MojoPad comes with a look you can use as it is, called Evidence sources. Using it is the fastest way to see the whole feature working, and everything it does you can also do by hand afterwards.

Open the library. Format ▸ Page Styles ▸ Style Templates…. Each look is a card drawn in its own styles, so you are looking at the thing rather than at its name. Evidence sources is first and marked Built in.
Look before you leap. Press Use in This Wiki… on that card and a preview opens. It shows every style and snippet the look holds, drawn for real; what was left out to keep pages safe, and why; and whether anything in it can hide words. Nothing is added or changed until you press a button. Show on This Page draws this window's pages in the look without changing a thing — close the preview and your own styles come straight back.
Use it. Press Use in This Wiki… in the preview. Every page of this wiki now shows the look, and the look it had before is kept in History.
Put a card on a page. Open any formatted text page, click where the card should go, and choose Format ▸ Page Styles ▸ Insert Snippet ▸ Source card. A small form opens with a blank for each part of a source, in the order it asks for them: Paper title, the one marked Needed; Authors, year; Journal; a Stance to choose; Web address; Abstract PDF; a Copy note, which starts out saying abstract-only; What it says, for the source in your own words; Verbatim quote, for the words you copied out of the paper; and Passage. Web address, Abstract PDF and Passage are links rather than words — each takes a web address, the exact title of a page in this wiki, or a link to words in one of its PDFs — so the sentence you copied belongs in Verbatim quote, which is the one the card draws on its highlighted ground, and Passage is the link that quote carries into the paper: right-click your highlight there, choose Copy highlight, and paste it into Passage. The quoted words themselves are then the link — bold on the highlight, underlined, in a link color made to read on it in both the light and the dark look — and a click on them opens the paper beside the page at those words. Leave Verbatim quote empty and the words of the link you pasted are used. Fill in what you have and leave the rest blank — a blank left empty is left out, unless it says it is needed.
Press Insert. The card lands on the page, wearing the wiki's styles. Nothing about it is special machinery: it is ordinary words in ordinary paragraphs, which happen to carry the names of styles this wiki draws.
Change the look, once, for all of them. Format ▸ Page Styles ▸ Edit Page Styles… opens the panel beside the page. Change a color in the styles and watch the card next to you change as you type. Press Save, and every card on every page of the wiki changes with it.

That is the loop. Everything below is that loop with the lid off.

Where the look lives, and what follows it around

The look is part of the wiki, not part of a page. It is not a page you could delete by accident, and it is not a setting on your Mac that a copy of the wiki would leave behind. Open the same wiki in two windows and both show it; open it on another Mac and it is still there.

Because it belongs to the wiki, it goes where the wiki goes:

It travels with a copy. Split a wiki in two, or copy a folder of pages into a brand new document, and the new one starts with the same look — a new document has none of its own, so nothing is replaced. Copying pages into a wiki that already has a look never changes that look; you are told instead how many styles the arriving pages use that the destination does not draw.
It travels with an export. A PDF, an exported web page, a published site and an ePub all carry the styles, so the export looks like the wiki.
It travels with a share. Share the wiki on your local network and visitors see it as you do.
It is sealed with the wiki's password. Put a password on a wiki and its page styles are encrypted with everything else, and so is their History. While the wiki is locked its pages draw plain and the panel says so; unlock it and the look returns.
Some formats keep the words and not the look, and say so rather than leaving you to notice: Word, Markdown and plain-text exports tell you how many styled passages went across as words alone. A site's feed is words for feed readers, and the XML backup holds each page's markup rather than the wiki's look — a copy of the wiki itself keeps that.

It reaches places a page's own styling never does

A page can carry its own styling, and always could. That styling only ever touches the page it sits on. The wiki's page styles reach every place MojoPad draws a page — the editor, every pane beside it, a page peeked at in a small window, cards on a canvas and on a storyboard, the preview under a database view's card, a note attached to a property, and the page as it is printed. Which is the point: a source card that looked right on the page and wrong on the board would be a card you could not trust.

Everything it draws stays inside that page's own box. It cannot reach the toolbar, the page list, the status line, a palette or the canvas around a card, and on a share it cannot touch the navigation. Plain text pages are left alone — they are text, and the styles have nothing to hold on to. A Markdown page is drawn with the wiki's styles, so a rule about ordinary paragraphs or tables shows there too, but the commands that put a style on words need a rich text page, because Markdown has nowhere to keep the style. Every one of them says so, and names the way through: Page styles work on formatted text pages. Convert this page to formatted text to use them.

Which look wins

Four things can decide how a word looks, and MojoPad puts them on in this order:

MojoPad's own look, including whichever theme you are running.
This wiki's page styles.
The page's own styling, if that page carries any.
Formatting on the words themselves — the bold you pressed, the color you picked. That sits on the words rather than in a rule about them, so it shows through the rules.

The order is the tiebreaker, not the whole story. Between two rules, the more specific one wins wherever it was written, and how specific each one is settles the matter before the order is looked at. A rule naming an element and a class beats a rule naming that class alone, whether the wiki wrote it or the page did.

So what a page's own styling promises is this: where the wiki's rule and the page's rule are equally specific, the page's wins. A wiki's styles get exactly the power a page's own styling has always had and no more, so nothing in a wiki can shut a page's own styling out. What a wiki can do is write a rule that is more specific than the one on the page — and then the wiki's rule is the one you see.

The look that comes with MojoPad is written that way, so this is worth seeing once rather than taking on trust. Evidence sources puts the element's name in front of its table rules:

/* in the wiki's page styles */
table.ev-table td { border-bottom: 1px solid light-dark(#c9ceda, #3a4150); }

/* on the page: loses, because the wiki's rule is the more specific one */
td { border-bottom: none; }

/* on the page: wins, because the two are now equally specific and the page is put on later */
table.ev-table td { border-bottom: none; }

Space works the same way. The built-in sets the space under a source card's title with its class named twice, so a rule on the page naming that class once does not move it — name it twice on the page as well and the page wins the tie. You do not have to work any of this out by eye: when something you wrote is not showing, the panel's Check This Page names what beat it and what to write instead.

A style is a class

Underneath, a style is a name you hang on some words, a paragraph, a box or a table, and a rule that says what that name looks like. You write the rule once in the panel; the Style menu is the list of names with a human label beside each, and that is what Apply Style offers you.

Tables need their rules written slightly harder, and this is the one piece of small print worth knowing before you write your first table style. MojoPad has its own look for tables, and it is specific enough to beat a plain class. Put the element's name in front and yours wins:

/* loses to MojoPad's own table look */
.stance-table td { border-bottom: 1px solid #c9ceda; }

/* wins */
table.stance-table td { border-bottom: 1px solid #c9ceda; }

You do not have to remember this. The panel's Check This Page finds rules that match something on the page beside you and still do not show, and tells you exactly what to write: “border” isn't taking effect on this page — something more specific wins. Put the element's name in front of the class, like “table.stance-table td”. It names the other two causes too: that this page's own styling sets the same thing too, and there it is the page's own that shows; or that the words there carry formatting of their own, which you can clear to let the style show.

Light pages and dark pages, in one rule

A color is written as a pair — how it looks on a light page, and how it looks on a dark one — so one set of styles is right in every theme, and right on paper:

.ev-card-title {
  font-weight: 700;
  color: light-dark(#10245a, #b7c8f2);
}

The panel draws a Colors in these styles strip: every pair you have written, shown as a light swatch and a dark one. Click a swatch and it takes you to the line it came from. Printing and PDF always use the light half, because paper is light whatever your screen is doing.

A color you set is the color of the links inside it

You file a paper as a source card, and its title is also the name of a page in this wiki — so MojoPad makes the title a link. You had given source titles a deep blue. The link arrived in MojoPad's link color instead, and the title you designed came out in two colors. On a stance label it was worse: white lettering on a filled band, and the one linked word all but unreadable against it.

So an element you give a color to now owns the links inside it. Color a heading, a stance label, a highlighted quote or a table's header row, and every link that lands in there is drawn in that color — a link you typed, one MojoPad made from a page name, a citation, a link to a file on your Mac. Underlines stay where they were, so a link still reads as a link; it reads in your color instead of its own. The rule travels with the look, so what you export, share or publish draws it the same way the window does.

When you do want a link in there to look like a link, write that rule yourself — and, like a table rule, write it slightly harder than you would expect. The rule MojoPad wrote for you counts the class and the link together, so a rule of your own naming the class once loses to it wherever you put it. Name the class twice, the same way the built-in look holds a block's space, and put it after the rule that set the color:

.ev-stance { color: #ffffff; }

/* later in the same styles: a link in a stance label, in a color of your own */
.ev-stance.ev-stance a { color: #ffe600; }

Two things keep their own coloring on purpose. A button under a card preview is drawn on a filled shape of its own and keeps the lettering that reads on it. And the small (PDF) mark after a link to a paper you hold keeps the quiet gray it is drawn in.

The Look tab: change how your whole wiki reads, in four decisions

Make a field notebook read like a book, a lab report like a report, a reference wiki like a reference. You do not have to write any CSS to do it. Format ▸ Page Styles ▸ Edit Page Styles… opens on the Look tab, and the page beside you changes as you move each control. Nothing is written to the wiki until you press Apply, and the status line then offers Undo.

The style editor, in the order you will reach for it: this tab for the look of the whole wiki; a right-click on a block to change how callouts, quotes or tables look everywhere (Change every callout at once); Manage Looks… to keep several looks and give each folder its own (Give each folder its own look), and to send one to a friend (Send a look to a friend); Blend Two Looks… for something between two of them (Mix two looks); See it on every page… before you keep any change (See every page change before you commit); and Match This… to set your pages like a paper you admire (Make your wiki read like a paper you admire).

A look is four decisions, one card each. The small numbered dots on the page, and the bracket over the column, show which part of the page each card changes while the tab is open (they are drawn over the page, never written into it).

Voice — which hand wrote this? Drag the dot on the pad (or click it and use the arrow keys): across is classic ↔ modern, up is quiet ↔ bold. Under it are two pairs of typefaces, each name set in its own face: Latin for headings and body, and 日本語 for Japanese. Click a name to pick from a short list; Exact values lets you type any face you have installed.
Rhythm — how much room to breathe? Two sliders: Tight ↔ Airy for the lines and the space between paragraphs, Gentle ↔ Dramatic for how big the headings are and how much room they take. Open Exact values to set the body size, the line height, the space between paragraphs, each of the six heading sizes, and the space before and after any heading.
Texture — what do quotes, callouts and the rest look like? Choose a kind of block along the top of the card — headings, quotes, lists, code, callouts, tables, pictures — and set it beside a live sample: a callout's surface (tint, gray, outline or none), its bar (weight, side and color), corners, padding, title and text size; a list's bullet shape, color, indent and spacing; a table's rules, header, stripes and padding; a picture's frame, corners and caption. The same controls open from the page itself — see Change every callout at once, below. Exact values has the numbers, typed.
Page — how wide is the column? A slider for the column's width in characters (the card says what that comes to in inches), the margins (Snug, Easy or Wide), and paragraphs Spaced or Indented, the way a book sets them.

Start from a look that is close. The row above the cards holds four looks to begin from — Notebook (MojoPad as it is), Manuscript, Report and Reference — and any looks of your own. Save look… asks for a name and keeps the look in your Style Templates library, where it is an ordinary look file you can share.

When you want an exact number. Every card has an Exact values fold. A number you type there outranks the sliders: its box gets an outline, the fold says how many are typed, and moving a slider no longer changes that number. Press the small ↺ in a box — or empty it — and the slider takes over again.

The same look in every theme. A look never holds a color. It says accent, ink or soft, and your theme supplies the actual color — terracotta in one theme, violet in another — so one look is right in all of them, and an export, a share or a PDF uses the colors of the theme you made it in. On a dark theme the look also tunes itself: light type on a dark background looks heavier, so headings come down a little in weight and the lines open a little. Dark tune is a switch at the foot of the tab; it is on until you turn it off.

What a look takes over. On the pages a look covers, it sets the text size, the line spacing, the paragraph spacing and the heading sizes itself, so Settings ▸ Editing does not change those pages (it still does for wikis with no look). A page that carries a style of its own keeps it, and the tab tells you when the page you are on is one.

If your wiki's styles are written by hand. The tab says Custom — can't blend or compare and its cards are read-only, because a hand-written sheet is not made of these decisions. Start a look from this builds one from the nearest of the four starting looks; your hand-written rules stay in History, and Reset puts them back. Editing the rules by hand in the Styles tab, on the other hand, makes a wiki's look custom.

Next: to change one kind of block everywhere from the page itself, see Change every callout at once; to keep several looks, Give each folder its own look.

Change every callout at once

Your callouts, quotes and tables should all look the same, and you would rather fix that on the page than hunt through a panel. Right-click the block. The menu names it — Change How Callouts Look…, or Quotes, Lists, Code, Tables, Images, Headings — and choosing it opens a card beside the page. (A picture's right-click menu has the same row.)

Read what will change. The card says it in numbers from your wiki: All 14 callouts on 9 pages change together. Under it, On: shows a few of the pages and Where the 14 are lists them with a count each — click one to go there. The other callouts on the page you are looking at carry a small moves with it tag.
Change it. The card has the same controls as the Look tab's Texture card for that kind of block: for a callout, its surface (Tint, Gray, Outline or None), the bar's weight, side and color, corners, padding, title and text size. Every callout on every page changes as you move a control. Exact values › opens the numbers to type.
Or drag it on the page. The block you clicked gets a dashed outline and a few handles: a grip on the bar (bar 4 pt), a knob on the corner (corners 6), a knob that opens or closes the padding (padding 14 × 10 — hold ⌥ to move all four sides together) and a knob under the block for the space around it. Each has its number beside it. A handle can also be reached with Tab and moved with the arrow keys (Shift for bigger steps), and VoiceOver reads its name and number. The handles are drawn over the page and never written into it: dragging them changes the look, not your words.
Keep it or put it back. The page changes as you go, but nothing is saved until you press Apply, which keeps the look in History first, so the status line (or Undo in History on the card) can bring the earlier look back. Esc, or a click anywhere off the card, puts back whatever you changed and did not apply; Reset puts the card back to how it opened without closing it. Same card for switches to another kind of block.

How far it reaches. Apply to says who the change is for. All 14 changes the look itself, for every page that wears it. In Surveys (the folder this page is in) keeps your change as a look of its own for that folder, and Only this as a look of its own for this one page; every other page stays as it is, and the look you started from is not touched. Choose one and the card recounts and says what Apply will do. A page that carries a style of its own keeps it. On a wiki whose page styles are written by hand the card says so instead of opening — the Look tab's Start a look from this comes first.

The card sits beside the page, on its right, with Same card for and Where the 14 are stacked under it. If the window is too narrow for the card beside the page, the page steps aside to make room while the card is open and settles back when it closes. The small labels on the handles never cover your words, the numbered dots, the card or one another: a label that would sit on something moves to the nearest free spot, with a thin line back to its handle, and when the room is short it shows just its number (15 for corners 15) — rest the pointer on the handle for the full words.

Next: All 14, In Surveys and Only this are looks you can keep and name; see Give each folder its own look. Before you press Apply, See it on every page… shows the whole wiki (See every page change before you commit).

Give each folder its own look

Your field notes should read like a notebook, your reports like a report, and you do not want to restyle them one page at a time. A wiki can keep several looks and say which pages wear which. Open Format ▸ Page Styles ▸ Manage Looks… (or Manage looks… › in the Look tab).

See your looks on your own page. The grid draws every look — the wiki's own, the built-in Manuscript, Report and Reference, and any you have kept — from the page you have open, so you are judging a look on your words, not on a sample. Under each is where it is used and how many pages wear it.
Keep one of your own. Pick a card and choose Duplicate, then type a name. ＋ New look starts one from this wiki's own look. Rename and Remove are on the cards you made (Remove can be undone, and never touches a file). To change a look's settings, go to a page that wears it and right-click a block, or use the Look tab for the wiki's own look.
Give it to a folder, a Kind or a page. Use for… offers Everything else, A folder…, A Kind… and Only this page. Or use ＋ Add a rule under Which look where: pick what the rule is for, which one, and the look. Edit on a row changes it or removes it.
Know which rule wins. A page uses the first rule that fits, and the order is fixed: its own rule, then its folder's (the nearest folder, if folders are inside folders), then its Kind's, then Everything else. A page in the Surveys folder that is also of the Report Kind wears Surveys' look. The Pages column counts the pages each rule decides, and the line under the grid says when every page is matched.

What does not change. A page that carries a style of its own keeps it, whatever look it wears. Nothing about a look is written into a page; a page moved to another folder simply wears that folder's look. If you delete a folder, a Kind or a look that a rule names, the row says so (it is dimmed with folder is gone) and matches nothing until you remove or edit it. Exports follow the pages: a page exported to HTML, PDF or a website wears the look it wears in the window, in the colors of the theme you exported from; an ePub, which has one stylesheet for the whole book, wears the look all its chapters share, and the wiki's own look otherwise. The column width and margins follow the wiki's own look for every page.

Next: to see what a rule would do before you save it, use See it on every page… beside Save (See every page change before you commit); for a look that sits between two of yours, Mix two looks.

Send a look to a friend

You have a look you like, and a friend or a colleague would like it too. Pick the card in Manage Looks… and look at Send a look on the right: it names the file (Dawn.mojostyles), its size, and what is in it — fonts by name, sizes and spacing, shapes and bars, colors as roles — and what never is: your pages and your theme. Share… saves it with the Mac's Save panel; Save to Desktop puts it on your Desktop in one press (never over a file that is already there); Copy puts the file itself on the clipboard, so you can paste it into a message or a folder. Send the file any way you like.

When one arrives. Drop a .mojostyles file anywhere in the window, or use Import look… (or File ▸ Import). A look is never applied on arrival. It appears under Received drawn on your page beside your current look, with the differences in plain words — Heading font: Iowan → Source Serif, Body size 15 → 14.5 pt, Callout bar & corners; the first four show and N more differences › opens the rest, so the three buttons below are always in reach — and, when a font is not on your Mac, which one will be shown instead. Colors arrive as roles, so the look takes on your theme's accent. Then choose Add to my looks, Try on this page (the Looks window steps aside so you can see it on the page you have open; nothing is saved) or Not now.

A file somebody sends is never trusted: every number is held to the range the sliders allow, a font's name can hold only letters, numbers, spaces and dots, and the file's own style rules are never used — the look is rebuilt from its settings. A file written as plain style rules instead of a look is shown as Custom — can't blend or compare; it can be tried from the Templates tab.

Next: a look that arrived can be blended with one of yours (Mix two looks) or tried on the whole wiki first (See every page change before you commit).

Mix two looks

Your field notes are a notebook and your reports are a book, and you want something between them — a little more book, but keep the notebook's headings. Choosing one look or the other is all-or-nothing; the mixing desk lets you slide each decision on its own and see your own page change as you do.

Open it from Format ▸ Page Styles ▸ Blend Two Looks…, from Blend with… under a look's card in Manage Looks…, or by right-clicking a look in the Look tab's row and choosing Blend with…. It opens with A, the look your page wears now, and B, the look you are moving toward; the names above the previews are lists, so you can pick any two looks. Only looks made from the four cards blend — a look written as plain style rules is custom, can't blend and is not offered.

Three previews of your own page. A is small on the left, B small on the right, and the blend is large in the middle. They are drawn from a few of the page's own blocks, so a long wiki costs nothing. Nothing is saved while you look: the middle preview is a sketch, and closing the desk (Not now, ✕ or Esc) throws it away.

The master and the four channels. The big fader at the left says how far toward B you are, from 0 (exactly A) to 100 (exactly B). The four beside it are the same four decisions as the Look tab — Voice, Rhythm, Texture and Page — and each can be moved on its own: pull Voice to 70 while Texture stays at 25. When you move the master, every channel moves with it and each keeps its own distance from it; a channel stops at 0 and at 100 and comes back where it was when the master does. Line the channels up puts them all back on the master. Drag a fader, or click it and use the arrow keys — one step at a time, ten with Shift — and a screen reader hears each one's number.

What every fader moves, with the numbers. Under each channel is a ledger of exactly what it changes between your two looks: Body 14 → 16 = 14.8 pt, Line 1.55 → 1.68, Quote bar 3 → 2. Numbers blend smoothly. Words — a typeface, a surface, whether a quote is italic — cannot be halfway, so they switch at 50 and the ledger says so: Fonts have switched. Faces change at 50, never halfway between, or Quote surface: tint → none · none from 50. Colors never mix; each is a theme color, and the blend picks one end's. Dark themes get the same gentle tuning a look gets anywhere else.

Keep it. The name box is filled in for you (Notebook, a little more book) and you can change it; Save keeps the blend in this wiki's looks, with a note of where it came from (blend of Notebook + Manuscript at 44%) and Undo on the pill that appears. It is then a look like any other: it can be sent, renamed, duplicated or blended again. Use for 32 pages keeps it and opens Which look where on the place the page is in — the folder, the Kind or everything else, with its real count — with the blend already chosen; nothing changes until you press Save or Use it there. The row of places above the previews lets you pick another place that wears A.

Too much to read at once? Each ledger lists its biggest moves first, every one whole, and keeps the rest under N more ›; press it and the ledger scrolls inside its own column (Fewer ‹ folds it again). The two small pages under the master are the two looks, each in its own typefaces.

Next: See it on every page… sits beside Use for N pages — see the whole wiki wear the blend before you keep it (See every page change before you commit).

See every page change before you commit

You are about to give the whole wiki a different look — or just your Surveys folder — and you want to know what you are in for. Before you press Apply, look at all of it. Anywhere a change is waiting, there is a link called See it on every page…:

in the Look tab, under Apply, once you have changed something;
on the right-click card (Change How Callouts Look…), for whichever Apply to you chose;
on the mixing desk, under Use for N pages;
in Manage Looks…: under Use for… on a look's card, beside Save when you give a folder, a Kind or one page a look, beside Use it for everything else, and under a look somebody sent you.

What you see. Try it on the whole wiki opens over the page: a wall of small pages — the top of each one, in the page's own words — and one vertical line. To the left of the line every page is drawn as it is today; to the right, as it would be with the change. The line cuts straight through every page at once, so you can sweep it across the wall and watch the wiki change. Drag the line by its round handle, or click it and use the arrow keys (Shift for ten steps, Home and End for the ends, Space to flip to the other side).

Which pages change. Pages the change does not reach are dimmed and say keeps its look — a page in another folder, a page whose Kind has a look of its own, a page with its own rule. A page that carries a style of its own is hatched and says own style: the look would have changed it, and it keeps its own instead. The bar underneath says it in numbers — 25 pages change, 86 keep their look, 7 keep their own style. Nothing is saved yet. — and they count every page of the wiki, not only the ones on the wall. The order of precedence is the one the Looks workspace states: a page's own rule, then its folder's, then its Kind's, then everything else; the wall asks exactly the question each page would ask.

A big wiki. The wall draws at most 140 pages and says so (140 of 204 pages shown). They are picked so that every kind of page is on it — a few pages that change are never lost among a hundred that do not — and they are drawn as you scroll to them, so a big wiki is as quick as a small one.

Try another look. The row at the top (and Try another look ▾) swaps the look being tried: the wall and the numbers follow at once. Click a page to open it wearing the new look; it goes back to its own look when you open another page.

Apply or Back. Nothing is written while the wall is open — not a page, not the wiki. Apply to 25 pages does exactly what the change would have done without the wall (the same save, the same History or Undo); Back (or Esc) leaves everything as it was.

Next: Make your wiki read like a paper you admire ends in this same wall.

Make your wiki read like a paper you admire

You have a journal article, a report or a book page whose type you love — the way its lines are spaced, how its headings sit, how wide its column is — and you want your own pages to feel like that without hunting through settings. Match this reads the page and sets yours to match, in proportion, in one step.

Open it from Format ▸ Page Styles ▸ Match This…, from the Match this… bar under the Look tab's row of looks, or by dropping a PDF onto Manage Looks…. It is a sheet in three steps — Drop, Read, Try & keep — and three columns: what you dropped, what MojoPad read, and your own page set like that.

From a PDF

Drop a PDF on the sheet (or press Choose a PDF…). The left side shows the file's own page with what was found marked on it: ① a heading, ② the body with a small bracket beside it for the line height and one under it for the column (62 characters · 4.3 in), and ③ a caption. In the middle, each row says what the file had, what it becomes, and how it is known. The marks never sit on the page's own letters: a book page whose next paragraph follows at once has no clear paper under the body, so the column's label hangs off the end of its bracket in the margin (shortened to 84 ch on a page with narrow margins), and a thin line joins any mark that has moved to what it names.

from the file — the file itself names it (the typeface's name, heading weights, small capitals);
measured — worked out from where the lines sit (the line height, the number of characters across, whether paragraphs are indented or have a gap, the size of the captions);
estimated — a typical value, because the file did not say.

The faces. MojoPad offers a short list of typefaces, the ones that ship with it and the ones your Mac has. A file's typeface is matched to the nearest of those — Minion Pro → Iowan Old Style, closest on this Mac — and a face that is already on the list is used as it is. Nothing is downloaded and the file's own font is not copied. If nothing close is on your Mac, your theme's own face stays.

Sizes scale to you. Your body stays the size you chose. MojoPad copies the proportions — each heading's ratio to the body, the line height, the column, the caption size — and applies them to your size. A paper set in small type does not make your wiki small.

Your page, set like that. The right side is your own open page drawn through a copy of your look with those numbers. It says preview · nothing changed yet and the foot says Matched on a copy of your look — Dawn stays as it is. Then you choose:

Try on this page closes the sheet and wears the match on the page you have open, as a preview; open any other page and it goes.
See it on every page… opens the wipe, so you can see all of your pages change under one line.
Save as look… asks for a name and keeps it in your looks, with Undo. It gives it to no page; use Manage Looks… to say which folder or Kind wears it.
Not now (or Esc) closes the sheet and nothing has been saved.

What is kept. Only numbers and a typeface name. None of the file's words are kept, the file is not copied into your wiki or anywhere else, and its name is not kept either. A saved look says only that it started with Match this.

When it can't read a file. A scanned page, or a photo of one, has no text in it, so there is nothing to measure: the sheet says it has no text layer and suggests a PDF saved from a document. A file that isn't a PDF, one locked with a password, one that is damaged, and one that is too big to read here each say so in a sentence.

From a web page

Choose Web page, paste the address and press Read this page. MojoPad fetches the page's text and the style sheets it links — nothing else: no scripts run, no pictures or fonts load, and no hidden browser window is opened. It then works out, from the page's own CSS, what the body, headings and captions are set in — each marked from the page's CSS where the page says it, and estimated where it did not (the column, for instance, is worked out from a width). The left side shows a sketch of what was found, not the page itself.

Only public web pages can be read. An address on your own Mac or network, a file: address or one with a password in it is refused. A page that needs its scripts to show any text (many web apps) says so; save the article as a PDF and drop that instead.

What each source can tell

The little table in the middle shows it: a PDF and a web page both give the typeface names, the sizes, the spacing and the column. A screenshot would give only sizes and spacing, measured, and no typeface names — it is coming later, and the sheet says so rather than pretending.

The Page Styles panel

Format ▸ Page Styles ▸ Edit Page Styles… opens it, docked to the right of the page you are on. It has five tabs — Look (above), Styles, Snippets, Templates and History.

Typing is a draft. Save is the change.

This is the most important thing about the panel, and it is written across the top of it: the page beside you changes as you type; Save puts the change on every page, export and share.

So you can try something. A half-written rule reaching every window, every export and every synced Mac the instant you typed it would be unusable, so it does not. While you have unsaved work an Unsaved changes pill sits in the header with Save and Discard beside it. Discard puts back what the wiki holds. The styles box is an ordinary text box, so ⌘Z undoes inside it as you would expect; and after a Save, the status line offers Undo, which puts back the styles from before that save.

While you are still typing a rule that is not finished, your pages keep the last set of styles that worked rather than flickering through nonsense, and the panel says which line it is waiting on.

What the report tells you

Under the styles box is a report, and every row of it has the action that completes it:

Left out to keep pages safe. The line, what it tried to do, and a plain reason. Show takes you to it; Remove takes it out.
Not recognized. A word MojoPad does not know — usually a typo: MojoPad doesn't recognize “colr” — check the spelling.
Not taking effect on this page. The check described above, run from a button rather than on every keystroke, naming what beats what and what to write instead.
Used on pages but not styled. Names your pages are already wearing that nothing here draws — the usual sign of a style you renamed. Add a Style writes the row for you, Show Pages shows you where they are.
Styles no page uses yet, and Not in the Style menu yet — a rule you wrote that nothing offers to apply. Add to Style Menu puts it in, with a guess at whether it belongs on words, a paragraph, a box or a table.
Good to know, which is never a refusal. That some rules can hide words — look here first if words seem to be missing from a page. That the styles also change MojoPad's own things, naming them the way you know them (page links, callouts, footnotes). And that a rule applies without naming any style at all, so it changes every page of this wiki.

Each style in the menu is drawn as a live chip showing its label, what it goes on, and how many pages use it, with Apply, Where Used and Edit Label on it.

Putting a style on, and taking it off

There are more doors than you need, on purpose, because people reach for different ones:

Format ▸ Page Styles ▸ Apply Style… — or ⌃⌘Y, which opens a chooser of the wiki's styles.
The Styles button in the format bar, beside the paragraph style menu. Its rows are drawn in the real styles, and a line at the top says what it is about to do — Choose a style for the 3 selected words, …for this paragraph, Wrap these 2 paragraphs in a box, …for this table. A row that cannot be used stays visible and dimmed, with the reason written on it.
Right-click a selection: Apply Style ▸ and Save Selection as Snippet….
The “/” menu in the page, as Style: Contrary and Snippet: Source card.
The command palette (⇧⌘P), which carries every one of them.

Nothing here is ever grayed out without saying why. If a style cannot go where the caret is, the command says so in the status line and names the way through.

The four kinds

Words. Goes on whatever you selected. Select inside words that already wear a style and the new one replaces it rather than nesting.
Paragraph. Goes on each line you touched. One of these per line; MojoPad's own formatting on that line is untouched.
Box. Wraps the lines you touched in a box. A box will not go inside a list, a table cell, a callout, an outline, a card or a property note — each of those refuses by name and says what can go there instead (usually a words style, or a paragraph style on a line of its own).
Table. Goes on the table the caret is in.

Remove Style takes off the innermost style at the caret, or every styled run the selection touches. Remove the Box (Keep the Words) is its own command, because removing a box and removing what is in it are different things and you should never get one when you meant the other. Clear formatting leaves page styles alone — it takes off bold and the like, not the style.

Swapping one label for another

Styles can be grouped, and the Stance group in the built-in look is the example worth copying: Contrary, Supportive, Equivocal, Neutral. Apply a different one to a label that already wears one and it swaps rather than stacking — and if the words in that label were the old name, the words follow, so a label reading Contrary becomes one reading Supportive and the status line tells you the words came too. Words you had written yourself are never rewritten.

Pressing Return, and pressing Delete

Return at the end of a styled paragraph gives you a plain one. A heading style does not run on into the next line.
Return inside a box stays inside the box. Press it again on an empty last line and you leave the box — the same way you leave a quote or a code block.
Delete at the start of an empty box removes the box.

Copying and pasting a styled card

Copy a card and paste it into another page of the same wiki and it keeps its styles. Styles that are not in this wiki's Style menu are not kept, which is what stops a paste from an unrelated wiki leaving names behind that nothing here draws.

A line you change becomes a new line

The same rule decides what a conversion keeps. Turn a paragraph into a heading, a bullet or a quote and MojoPad builds the new line and carries over the styles this wiki's Style menu defines. It does not carry anything else — and that is worth knowing if your pages came in from somewhere else.

Why an imported look does not follow. A page brought in from another program often arrives carrying a stylesheet of its own and lines marked with names from it. Those names are not in your Style menu: MojoPad did not write them and does not know what they mean, so a converted line does not wear them. It is the paste rule above, applied to the same question.

And carrying the name over would not help anyway, which is the part that is easy to misread as a bug worth fixing. An imported stylesheet almost always says which kind of line a rule is for as well as which name — a rule for a paragraph of that name, not for any line of that name. Every conversion changes the kind of line. So a converted line keeping the name would still be drawn plainly, and would now carry a name that looks live and is not.

What to do instead. If a look from an imported page is one you want to keep using, give it a name in this wiki's own Style menu — Format ▶ Page Styles, where a rule you write is a rule MojoPad carries through every conversion, every paste and every export. A look that is yours behaves like one; a look that arrived with a file stays with the lines it arrived on.

Snippets: the pieces you use again and again

A style says how words look. A snippet is the shape itself — a whole source card, a stance table with a row per source — with blanks you fill in each time. Snippets belong to the wiki's page styles, so a look that travels brings its snippets with it.

Inserting one. Format ▸ Page Styles ▸ Insert Snippet ▸, Edit ▸ Insert under a Snippets heading, the “/” menu or the palette. If the snippet has blanks, a Fill In form opens with a box for each: plain text, a choice from a group, a link, or a set of rows for a table. Fill in what you have; a blank you leave empty is left out unless it is marked Needed. If the page is drawn again while the form is open — another window saves it — the snippet still goes where your cursor was. If that place can’t be found for certain in the page as it is now, or you bring another pane to the front, nothing is added and the form says why.

Links in a blank are checked, not trusted. A link blank takes a web address that starts with https, the exact title of a page in this wiki — which becomes a real page link — or a link to words in one of this wiki's PDFs, below. Anything else is refused by name, and a near miss offers you the page titles it nearly matched.

A card that links to the very words

A source you can check in one click. Your card says what a paper found; its link goes to the sentence in the paper that says it. Months later, a click on the card opens the paper beside it at those words, with a line drawn to them — no hunting through the PDF for the passage you meant.
A stance table that cites its passages. Each row's title links to the passage it rests on, not just to the paper, so a colleague reading the table lands where you did.
Cards an assistant fills in for you. An assistant connected to MojoPad can put the same kind of link in a card's link blank, and MojoPad checks its words against the paper before the card goes in — so a card it files can't quote words the paper doesn't have.

How. In the paper, right-click one of your highlights and choose Copy highlight (or select words and choose Copy Link to Selected Words). Insert the snippet, click into its link blank — Passage, on the Source card — and paste. Press Insert. The link on the card goes to those words: click it and the paper opens beside the page at them, with the line, the way any link to a passage does. A link blank whose snippet has words of its own for the link keeps them; one with an empty blank inside it shows the paper's words there instead. That is how the Source card works now: its Verbatim quote sits inside the Passage link, so the quoted words are the link, and the card no longer says (passage in MojoPad) beside them. Paste a link to a passage into Passage and leave Verbatim quote empty, and the card quotes the words of the link. Give Passage a page title or a web address and no quote, and the card shows a plain source line: the title or address as a working link, with no quotation marks and no yellow highlight, so it never looks like a quote.

The form shows you what you pasted. The moment a link to words is in Passage, a line appears under the box with the words and the name of the paper they are from, so you can see you copied the right passage before you press Insert. On the new card, a quote box inside the link that you haven't typed in fills itself with the same words and is held, with a note saying why, so the card can't quote words the paper doesn't have. (Any snippet with a text blank inside a link does the same.) A title or quote you have already typed there stays yours: it isn't locked or replaced, and the card is made with it as you wrote it. Empty the box while the link points to words and it is held then. If more than one link surrounds a box, it stays held until none of them points to words. Clear Passage, or put a page title or web address in it, and a held box is yours again, empty as it was.

A wiki you already have keeps the card it has. A look belongs to its owner, so nothing changes by itself: a wiki made with the earlier Source card still shows (passage in MojoPad). To bring the new card in, open Style Templates, find the template the wiki started from — it says A newer “Evidence sources” came with MojoPad — and choose Update This Wiki from It. You see what would change first, and the look the wiki had is kept in History. An assistant that made the wiki with the earlier card can still read it and fill its snippets as before.

What MojoPad checks first, and what it says when a link can't go on the card. Nothing is added until every link passes:

The page is here and open to it. A link to a page that isn't in this wiki, or to a paper with a password of its own — locked or open — is refused before MojoPad looks at the paper at all, in one sentence that doesn't say which: the words of such a paper would travel in the card's link.
It is this wiki's link. A link copied from words in another wiki — a copy of this one included — is refused, and you're asked to copy it again from the paper here.
The words are the paper's. Words the paper doesn't have, or a highlight it doesn't have any more with no words beside it, are refused. If MojoPad hasn't read the paper's words yet (one just added, or a scan with no text in it), the card goes in and the status line says its link wasn't checked.
It can land. Words are found in a PDF, and a book's highlight in its book; a link to words in any other page is refused, and that page's title links to the whole page instead. A quote too long or too short for MojoPad to find is refused too.
The card shows it. A link to words in a part of the snippet that is left out — beside a blank you left empty — is refused rather than dropped without a word.

Or fill them in later. Insert with Blanks Instead puts the snippet in with its blanks still showing, ready to type over. The first is selected for you, and ⌃/ jumps to the next one.

Saving your own

Write the shape you want on a page, once, by hand. Select it and choose Save Selection as Snippet…. A dialog opens showing what you selected, with one instruction: Click the words that change each time — they become blanks to fill. Click a run of words and it becomes a text blank named after the style it sits in; click a link and it becomes a link blank; click a stance label and it becomes a choice over that whole group. Name it, and it is in the menu.

Cards that link to a passage keep their link. Select a finished source card and save it, and the link to the passage becomes a link blank, named for you to fill in, just as a link to a page does. The old passage's words stay behind, because they belong to that passage: paste a new link into the blank when you use the snippet and the new card quotes the words of the new one. With Insert with Blanks Instead the link shows as a blank to type over. The address of the passage never goes into the snippet.

A snippet saved or changed in the panel is part of your unsaved work — the status line says so — so Save in the panel is what keeps it.

Style templates: a look as a file

A style template is a whole look — the styles, the Style menu and the snippets — saved as one small file ending in .mojostyles. It goes in an email. It is how a look gets from your wiki to next year's wiki, or to a colleague's Mac.

The library

Format ▸ Page Styles ▸ Style Templates… is your collection on this Mac: a grid of cards, each drawn in its own styles rather than described. Evidence sources is first, marked Built in; it cannot be deleted or written over, and offers Duplicate to Change instead. Each card offers Use in This Wiki…, New Wiki with These Styles…, Share…, Duplicate, Rename, Move to Trash and Show in Finder. Import… sits at the top.

An assistant can hand you one. Ask an assistant connected to MojoPad for a house style and it can put the look straight into your Style Templates, rather than writing a file for you to go and find. Nothing about your wikis changes when it does: the look arrives in your library and waits there. You apply it the same way you apply any other — from the preview above, which draws every style for real before you press. MojoPad asks you before it saves one, every time, even if you have allowed assistants to make changes outright, because that permission is about the wiki you have open and this is not that. A look named the same as one you already have is saved beside it, never over it. With Ask me before an agent changes one turned off in Settings ▸ AI Agents, it is refused rather than asked — even with changes allowed outright, because this is the one question that permission never answers.

Or it can write a wiki’s look outright. Point an assistant at a wiki file on your Mac and ask it to restyle those pages, and it can do that too — useful when you keep a shelf of wikis that should all look the same, and you would rather not open each one and apply a template by hand.

MojoPad asks you first, every time, and the question is written to tell you what it costs before what it brings. It names the wiki, it names the look, and it leads with what goes: how many of your own styles would disappear, and that pages wearing them will draw plain from that moment. It names those styles too whenever the assistant could have read them to you anyway — which is any wiki you have opened in MojoPad yourself. In a wiki the assistant made or opened for you, and whose look you have since changed here, it can only count them, because those are your words and it is not allowed to read them. Then what arrives, then whether the rules underneath are written differently. It never shows you the rules themselves, because a stylesheet is not something anybody can read in a dialog box.

The look you had is kept in History before the new one lands. That is not a habit of the assistant’s — it is part of the same step, so a look can never be replaced without the old one being kept first. If it could not be kept, nothing is written at all. So a yes you regret is one Restore away, in Format ▸ Page Styles ▸ History, where the row reads Imported. Under Styles, the wiki will say it started from whatever the assistant called the look, so you can tell at a glance that it did not come with the wiki.

Two wikis are refused, and it is worth knowing why. A wiki with a password is refused outright: the look it has now could not be kept in History without the password, and replacing a look with no way back is the one thing this must never do. And a wiki open in MojoPad right now is refused, because the window holding it open has its own copy of that wiki’s settings and would write the old look back over the new one the next time you pinned a page or dragged a folder. Close it and ask again, or have the assistant hand the look to your Style Templates instead, which needs nothing closed. If MojoPad is not running at all when the assistant asks, it cannot tell whether a window has it open — so it says so, and you can close and reopen that wiki to be sure.

You can turn all of it off. These are ordinary assistant changes, so Settings ▸ AI Agents governs them: with changes to wikis you already have switched off, a look is refused like anything else. What the standing permission does not do is skip the question. Allowing an assistant to make changes is about pages; a look decides how every page in the wiki is drawn, including the ones you write next year, so it is asked about separately every time.

Saving this wiki's look as one

Format ▸ Page Styles ▸ Save Page Styles as Template…. Give it a name and a line about what it is for, and check which snippets go with it — each shown as it will look. If a name you already use comes up, you are asked once: Replace, or Keep Both. Wikis that already used the old one keep their own copy either way.

Two things are checked before the file is written, and both are shown rather than done quietly:

Words that name a place on this Mac. A folder in a comment, a path in a note — anyone who opens the file can read them. You get the list, with Remove Them and Share As Is. Nothing is taken out without your press.
A wiki with a password. Saving a template out of one puts a copy on this Mac without that password, snippet words and all, and says so before it does.

What is in the file: the styles themselves, the Style menu with each style's label and what it goes on, and the snippets with their blanks. What is not: your wiki's name, your name, any path, any page, any page's words, and the values a blank happened to be filled in with last time.

Sending one, and receiving one

Share… on a card, or File ▸ Export Document ▸ Page Styles Template…, writes the file wherever you choose.

A template that arrives goes to the preview, always, by every route — File ▸ Import ▸ Import Page Styles Template…, the library's Import…, dropping the file on a window, or double-clicking it in the Finder. It never quietly becomes a page, and it never quietly becomes your wiki's look.

The preview shows, before you have agreed to anything:

its name, what it is for, and how many styles and snippets it holds;
every style and snippet drawn for real, using the arriving look's own styles;
Left out to keep pages safe, by reason and with a Why on each;
what the snippets lost on the way in: pictures from the web removed, links to the sender's own wikis turned into blanks for you to fill, other links reduced to their words;
how many of its rules can hide words, and whether it changes MojoPad's own things;
what using it would replace — the styles your wiki has that this one does not, and how many pages wear them.

Show on This Page draws this window's pages in the arriving look, changing nothing; your own comes back when the preview closes. Then Add to My Style Templates keeps the file without touching this wiki, and Use in This Wiki… applies it. Snippets with the same name as one you already have are asked about once: Keep Mine or Use the Template's.

Why applying copies, and never links

A template is copied into the wiki, not linked to it. The wiki keeps a note of the name it started from and nothing else. That is what makes the wiki whole: it looks the same on a colleague's Mac, in an export and on a share, with nothing to install. It also means editing a template never reaches out and restyles wikis nobody is looking at, and a file that turns up in your library cannot change a wiki you already have.

The Templates tab in the panel is where the two sides meet up, and nothing on it ever happens by itself:

Started from Evidence sources. You've changed these styles since.
When the template in your library has moved on: Your Evidence sources template has changed since this wiki used it, with See What Changed and Update This Wiki from It.
Going the other way, on the card of the template this wiki started from: Update “…” from This Wiki. Other wikis keep their copy, and you are told so before it happens.
After an update to MojoPad: A newer Evidence sources came with MojoPad.

Starting a new wiki with a look

New Wiki with These Styles… on a library card makes the wiki already wearing it. And when you set up a practice on a new wiki, there is a Page styles row offering None, the built-in look, or any of your own. None is chosen, so a wiki is only ever styled because somebody asked for it.

History, and getting an earlier look back

Every save keeps the look it replaced. So does applying a template, and so does restoring. The History tab lists them newest first, each with its date and how many styles and snippets it held.

Restore puts that earlier look in the panel's editor — and no further. It is a draft like any other until you press Save, so you can look at it, change your mind, and Discard. The most recent entries are kept and the oldest fall off the end.

History is stored inside the wiki, so it travels with it and is sealed by the wiki's password along with everything else. If it cannot be written — some wikis arrive with that folder unusable — you are told in one sentence and offered the choice to save anyway without keeping the previous look. Nothing is written until you press.

A wiki somebody sent you

A wiki you did not write arrives wearing its author's look, and you are not asked first — being asked a question about styles you have not seen yet is not a choice, it is an interruption. What you get instead is a way out that is always in the same place.

View ▸ Show Pages Without Page Styles. Choose it and that wiki's pages draw plain. A small Page styles off for this wiki chip appears with Turn On… beside it, so you always know which state you are in.

Three things about that switch are worth knowing, and all three are deliberate:

It is per wiki. Turning off one sender's look leaves your own wikis alone.
It is per Mac, and it is yours. It is not stored in the wiki, so it does not travel to anybody else, and it does not come back the next time the sender sends you a copy.
The wiki cannot set it, and neither can anything in it. Not a page, not a script on a page, not an assistant. It is changed by you, from the menu or from the chip, and nowhere else.

While the styles are off, exports of that wiki leave them out too — what you see is what you send. The one export that asks you before it writes, Compile, says so on the sheet: Page styles are off for this wiki on this Mac, so this export leaves them out.

Taking a look off for good

The switch above is about this Mac: the wiki still carries its styles, and they are still there for everybody else, in every export and in every share. When you want the look gone — from a wiki of your own you have changed your mind about, or one you were sent and want to keep without its author's styling — use Format ▶ Page Styles ▶ Remove Page Styles….

It opens the Page Styles panel first and asks there, under the rules it is about, because a look is a thing worth seeing before you take it off. Say yes and every page goes back to plain.

The look is kept in History before it goes, which is the part worth relying on: the Undo beside the message puts it straight back, and the History tab keeps it after that, under the time it was removed.

The whole look goes, and the whole look comes back. The Style menu's entries and your snippets are part of a wiki's look — they sit beside the rules, not beside your pages — so they go when it goes and return when it returns. What you have written is untouched: every word stays exactly where it is, still marked as whatever you marked it, simply with no styling to wear until you give it some again.

A wiki that has no page styles says so rather than pretending to work. And if you have unsaved changes in the panel when you ask, it says so too and leaves them alone: Save or Discard them first, then remove the look. History keeps looks you have saved, never a draft in progress.

What page styles cannot do, and why

A wiki's styles reach every page of that wiki, including pages you write in somebody else's wiki. So they are held to the same limits a page's own styling has always had, and to two more. Nothing here is a matter of opinion; each one is refused, counted, and explained on the line it was written on.

It cannot…	Why
Write words onto your pages	A style can decorate words but not add them, so what you read is what search, an export and your assistant read. This is the one that matters most in a research wiki: no look can make a card say Supportive when the words say otherwise.
Stop you editing	No look can make pages impossible to click in or type in.
Fetch anything from the internet	A picture named on a website would tell that site you opened the page. Pictures pasted into the styles themselves work normally.
Add a font	It can ask for fonts already on the Mac by name, but cannot bring new ones along.
Escape the page	Anything it draws is held inside the page's own box, and clipped at its edge. It cannot cover the toolbar, the page list, a palette, a permission question, or a share's navigation.
Reach outside the page in a rule	A rule that names the window, the page's surroundings or the app around it is left out, with the reason: Looks outside the page — start the rule with a class.
Run anything, or animate	No scripts, no animation, and a snippet that holds a script marker is refused outright.

One thing it can do, and the panel says so rather than refusing it: hide words. Making words invisible has honest uses, so it is allowed — and counted, in plain sight, both in the panel and in an arriving template's preview: 2 rules can hide words — look here first if words seem to be missing from a page. Turning the styles off shows everything, and History puts back the look from before.

Working with your AI assistant

An assistant that has MojoPad's tools can read a wiki's page styles and use them, and cannot write them. See AI Agents for how an assistant is connected and what else it may do.

It can read the Style menu and the snippets — each style's name, its label, what it goes on, and each snippet's blanks. So “read these three papers and file each one as a source card” works: it reads the look, then writes pages that use it.
It can add a snippet by name when it adds a page or adds lines to one, filling the blanks the same way the form does and checked the same way. You are asked about the write exactly as you are asked about any other, and the question names the snippet.
It cannot write, replace or delete the styles, the Style menu or the snippets. No tool does it. A look reaching every page of a wiki is not something a confirmation sheet could honestly describe.
It cannot read or apply your templates, and it cannot touch the off switch.
A wiki with a password refuses it the styles always — even while the wiki is open and unlocked in front of you.
It can start a new wiki with MojoPad's own look, by name, and with no other.

So how do you get a look out of an assistant? Ask it for a style template file. It writes a .mojostyles file, you open it, and the preview is the door — the same door a colleague's file comes through, showing you what it holds and what was left out before anything is applied. The file is plain text in this shape:

{
  "mojopadPageStyles": 1,
  "name": "Lab sources",
  "about": "Source cards and a stance table for the group's papers.",
  "css": ".src-card { border-left: 10px solid light-dark(#17398a, #7fa2e6); }",
  "styles": [
    { "class": "src-card", "label": "Source card", "kind": "box" }
  ],
  "snippets": [
    { "name": "Source card",
      "html": "<div class=\"src-card\"><p><#Paper title#></p></div>",
      "fields": [{ "name": "Paper title", "kind": "text", "required": true }] }
  ]
}

A style's kind is one of words, paragraph, box or table. A blank's kind is one of text, choice, link or rows. Every field is rebuilt from scratch when the file is read, so anything else in it is dropped and counted rather than trusted.

Snippets, clippings, or templates?

Three things put words on a page, and the names are close enough to be worth one table.

	What it is	Where it lives	Reach for it when…
Snippet	A piece of a page in this wiki's styles, with blanks to fill in	In the wiki's page styles — travels with the look	You write the same shape over and over: a source card, a table row per source
Clipping	A page of this wiki whose name begins Clipping:, inserted as it stands	A page, which you can link to and search	You paste the same fixed block of text often
Template	A starting point for a whole new page	A page named Template:	You make pages that all begin the same way

They insert from the same menu and are labeled so you can tell which is which. A style template is a fourth and unrelated thing: a whole look as a file, not words for a page.

When something looks wrong

“I applied a style and nothing happened.” Three causes, in the order they are worth checking. One: page styles are off for this wiki on this Mac — look for the chip, or check View ▸ Show Pages Without Page Styles. Two: the rule is losing to something more specific. Open the panel and press Check This Page; it names the rule and tells you what to write instead, usually the element's name in front of the class. Three: the rule was left out to keep pages safe — the report says which line and why.

“I changed the styles and my pages did not change.” You have a draft. Look for the Unsaved changes pill: the page beside the panel is showing your draft and nothing else is, until you press Save.

“A wiki somebody sent me is unreadable.” View ▸ Show Pages Without Page Styles, and it draws plain. Per wiki, on your Mac only, and nothing in the wiki can turn it back on.

“I want my old look back.” The History tab, then Restore, then Save. If you have only just saved, the status line's Undo is quicker.

“Can somebody hide words from me with this?” They can make words invisible, and you are told how many rules are able to do it — in the panel, and in the preview before you ever use an arriving look. Turning the styles off shows everything the pages hold. What a look cannot do is put words on a page that are not really there, or take words out of what search, an export or your assistant reads.

“A pasted card lost its styles.” Styles are kept on a paste only when this wiki's Style menu has them. Pasting from a wiki with a different look brings the words and not the look, which is what stops names piling up that nothing draws.

“The commands are refusing on this page.” They need a formatted text page. A Markdown page, a plain text page and a page you are reading as its source all say so and name the way through.

“Word lost my cards.” Word, Markdown and plain text keep the words of a styled passage and not its look, and each tells you how many passages that was. A PDF, an exported web page, a published site, an ePub and a share all keep the look.

“A locked wiki opened in an older MojoPad.” Page styles are sealed with the wiki's password, and a version of MojoPad older than the one page styles arrived in does not know that there is anything there to keep. Open a password-protected wiki in one of those and save it, and its page styles are dropped. Your backups still hold them. If you move a protected wiki between Macs, keep MojoPad current on both.

What the diagnostic report says

Help ▸ Save Diagnostic Report… writes the report you send when something is wrong, and page styles are in it as counts and states, never words.

For each wiki it says whether the wiki carries a look at all — or why its pages are drawing plain instead: the look is sealed with the wiki's password, or was written by a newer MojoPad, or is over what MojoPad allows, or cannot be read. Then the shape of it: how large the styles are against what is allowed, how many styles and how many snippets against theirs, how many earlier looks History is keeping, and the line most reports are sent to have answered — whether every style in the Style menu really is drawn by a rule, and how many are not. (A style nothing draws is the usual answer to “I applied it and nothing happened”.)

For each window it adds what that window is drawing: whether the wiki's sheet is applied, how many parts of the stored look were left out on the way, and whether a style template is being previewed there.

If a wiki is wearing a look you do not remember choosing, two places answer it. Under Styles in the panel, a wiki says where its look started — the name of the template or the look it came from, or Came with this wiki if it has always had it. And the report's assistants section lists the last twenty-five things an assistant did through the file tools, so a look written by one shows there as the wiki it was written to and how many styles and snippets it carried. History, under Format ▸ Page Styles ▸ History, holds the look that was there before it, whatever put the new one in.

The wikis you have switched page styles off for are counted and not named. And none of your styles, class names, labels, snippet names or template names appear anywhere in it — not yours and not a sender's, and the assistants section holds counts rather than any style's name. A report you paste into an email should not carry the wording of anybody's work.