Stay up to date with new features and improvements to Essay.app!
When the Comments toolbar is closed in Minimal mode, clicking anywhere outside a comment highlight now closes the comment popover. This makes it easier to dismiss comment popovers and matches expected behavior.
If the app cannot save your work due to a temporary database or network issue, your changes are now kept safely in your browser and you will see a clear message that saving is unavailable. You can manually retry saving and your edits will not be lost, helping you avoid losing work during brief outages.
Needs work and Good work marks now read as a short sentence, your own comments are labelled "You", and a paragraph's comments open one at a time with arrows to step through them. In Minimal, highlights stay hidden until you open a paragraph's comments, and the comment card now sits below the text it's about. The right toolbar is a little wider, and comment cards stand out better in dark mode.
You can now select whether page numbers appear at the top or bottom of each page when exporting your essay to PDF, Word, or Google Docs. This gives you more control over formatting to match style guidelines or personal preference.
Deleting a comment now clears its highlight everywhere it appeared, including earlier hand-ins, and adding a comment can no longer remove someone else's highlight. Citing web pages with international domain names also works now.
You can now delete a thread from an earlier hand-in while viewing a later submission, even if the text was edited between hand-ins. The thread is removed from all relevant snapshots and the live essay, making thread management smoother and more predictable.
Feedback on highlighted text now stays listed even if you edit or remove that text in a later submission. The quoted text is labelled [edited] when you have changed it and [removed] when it is no longer in your essay, so it is clear why the feedback is still shown.
In the Outline tool, press Cmd+Enter (Ctrl+Enter on Windows) while typing a new outline topic to save it and start the next one right away. The same shortcut works while renaming a topic, saving the new title and opening a fresh topic below.
When you export an essay with emoji to PDF, the emoji are now rendered as monochrome line art instead of empty boxes. This makes exported documents look more like your original essay, even though the emoji are not in color.
Teachers can assign work, track submissions, and review students' writing with more insight into their process. Students can access instructions & resources, and have a structured workspace to complete, format and submit their work, all in one place. Contact support if you'd like to turn it on for your classroom.
You can now save any essay as a template from the workspace menu! Start new documents from a template from Essay Home, or insert a template into the essay you're writing.
Menus, modals, panels and editor popups now use outlines instead of shadows in dark mode, and hover states have proper contrast. The notes, references and other side panels sit clearly above the page, and cards, badges and empty states across the app now pick up the dark palette too.
Comments and highlights now stay attached to their sentences as you use Rewrite. Feedback categories show their colors in the comment type picker and the comments filter.
Book and article imports from Zotero are now more reliable. Hyphenated or multiple ISBNs are correctly recognized, and articles without a journal title will still import successfully, with improved venue detection for conference papers, preprints, theses, and reports.
A new home for everything shipping in Essay: new features and improvements, updated automatically as we release them. Follow along here, subscribe via RSS, or check What's new in the app.
Dragging the selection handles on mobile no longer gets mistaken for a swipe between tools, so the workspace stays in the editor while you select text.
Edit freely while you rewrite: reshape paragraphs, add sentences, split or merge them, and your rewrites stay synced with their matching sentence better than ever.
You can now add a comment to a sentence that has an active rewrite.
Searching a long essay no longer freezes the editor while you type. Even single-letter terms with thousands of matches highlight instantly. Highlights also line up correctly when "Ignore diacritics" is on.
Opening a promo link now applies your discount code automatically at checkout, so there's no need to copy and paste the code.
Footnotes in exported Word documents now have a space between the footnote number and the text, matching Word's own footnote layout.
Pressing Cmd/Ctrl+A on shared and read-only essays selects the essay text instead of the whole page, and readers no longer see an empty title placeholder on untitled essays.
Pick a color for each outline section from the new hue-sorted picker, select multiple sections at once, and untitled topics now show clear placeholders.
Click the editor toolbar's drag handle to choose which tools appear for each essay, with matching controls in workspace settings.
Small app updates no longer interrupt your writing session. You're only prompted to reload for bigger releases.
Hyperlinks in exported Word documents now use Word's link style, so they show up blue and underlined instead of looking like plain text.
Selecting sentences that contain footnotes in the Reorder tool no longer duplicates the footnotes in your essay.
The notes toolbar now has tabs to switch between notes linked to the essay you're working on and all of your notes.
Blocks in the editor get a new actions menu with save-for-later and copy, drag-and-drop reordering, and toolbars for working with multiple blocks or list items at once.
Name your essay right in the workspace, independent of its title. Exports gain workspace-styled title layouts, citation-free title modes, and an additional text field.
Imported documents now keep the file name and the document's own title separate, instead of turning the file name into a heading.
Scrolling through past versions of your essay on iPhone and iPad now responds correctly to touch.
When you edit a link, the editing popover now appears directly under the link instead of floating near the toolbar.
Pasting from Word, Google Docs, Notion, or Markdown now preserves your headings, lists, and formatting as proper essay blocks.
Straight quotes become curly quotes, double hyphens become dashes, and other typographic touches are applied automatically as you write.
Footnotes imported from Word documents no longer carry over unsupported formatting.
Restoring an earlier version of your essay now keeps the citation style you had selected.
Underlines and unicode subscripts now render correctly in exported PDFs.
Essay now has a free plan alongside the new Core and Pro tiers, so you can start writing for free and upgrade when you need more.
Gift purchases and redemption have been redesigned, and gift emails now arrive from the person who sent them.
A rebuilt product tour walks you through the workspace when you're getting started.
You can now drag list items into a new order from the Reorder and Sentence views.
Search your essay for a word or phrase and replace it everywhere at once.
PDF export now supports title pages, running headers, and margins formatted to APA, MLA, or Chicago style, with your bibliography included.
Manage your card, billing email, and subscription directly from the new billing settings page.
Essays in the trash now open in view-only mode so you can check the contents before restoring or deleting them.
Add in-text citations and footnotes, browse your reference library, and export your essay right from your phone.
Document stats now show an exact page count, plus word and character counts for selected text in the goals toolbar.
Adding references is now one streamlined flow with advanced search, type and year filters, and duplicate detection.
Offline writing is now sturdier, with hardened syncing, cached fonts, and clearer feedback when you're disconnected.
Getting started is faster, with topic recommendations and a cleaner signup flow on desktop and mobile.
Version history now lives in a dedicated modal with previews and inline actions, on desktop and mobile.
Bring existing writing into Essay. Imports preserve headings, highlights, blockquotes, and fonts.
Connect your Zotero account to import your reference library, including your notes.
Choose between footnotes and endnotes for your essay. Endnotes carry through to PDF preview and Word import.
The new Discover tab recommends books and papers for your topic, searching Crossref and Open Library as you type.
Export your essay to Google Docs, a Word document, or Markdown, footnotes included.
Build a reference library, cite sources in your text with page locators, add footnotes, and generate a bibliography in APA, MLA, or Chicago style.
Saving, naming, and restoring versions of your essay is now faster and more reliable.
Not sure what to write about? The new topic tool suggests essay topics and angles based on your interests, with quizzes to help it get to know you.
Our landing page has been redesigned from the ground up to better show what Essay can do.
Add checklists to your essays and notes, and insert links in the editor, notes, and comments.
Readers of a shared essay can now highlight passages and leave comments.
