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Drafts and Files

A .grafida file is one article — its text, its pictures and its metadata — packaged into a single file you can move around by hand. It is how work travels between Grafida on one machine and Grafida on another, and how you keep an offline copy of something important.

There is no sync service behind this. Exporting and importing is a deliberate, one-off exchange, never something that happens in the background.

Exporting

Open the article, press File, and choose Export…. Grafida saves the article first, packages it, and opens your system's ordinary Save dialogue so you can choose where the file goes. Export… and Replace from file… appear once the article has been saved at least once.

Closing that dialogue without saving cancels the export. That is not a failure and Grafida does not treat it as one.

Importing as a new article

Import from file…, on the Articles screen's toolbar, reads a .grafida file and creates a new local article from it. It never overwrites something you already have.

The imported article belongs to whichever site is currently active, and is not linked to any article on it. Publishing it creates a new article rather than replacing anything.

Replacing the article you have open

Replace from file…, in the editor's File menu, is the other thing entirely: it overwrites the article you have open — title, alias, category, access, language, tags, custom fields, images and body — from a .grafida file you pick, after asking you to confirm. The article keeps its link to whichever article on the site it already had.

Note

Replacing restarts the editor, so the undo history goes with it. That is honest rather than awkward: the undo history belonged to an article that no longer exists.

Importing Markdown

Import Markdown, also in the File menu, converts a Markdown file to HTML and puts it in the body of the article you have open, after asking. It replaces the body and nothing else — the title, the category and everything in the Inspector are left as they are, and nothing is saved until you press Save.

Raw HTML inside the Markdown file is kept as it is. Tables, strikethrough and task lists are understood; a bare www.example.com in running text stays plain text rather than becoming a link.

Note

There is no Markdown export. .grafida is the format for moving an article; Markdown is only a way of getting text in.

Opening a file from outside Grafida

A .grafida or Markdown file can reach Grafida from elsewhere on your device — the Share sheet from a file manager, an email attachment or a cloud-storage app, or Open with on a file Android already knows the type of.

A .grafida file opened this way becomes a new local article. A Markdown file opened this way becomes a new local article too — which is the opposite of what Import Markdown does inside the editor, deliberately: a file handed over from outside has nowhere else to go, whereas the editor already has an article to put the text into.

If no site is connected yet, Grafida holds the file and imports it the moment you add one, rather than dropping it.

What a .grafida file does and does not carry

It carries the article's text, its metadata and copies of its pictures, so it opens correctly on a machine that has never seen the originals.

It deliberately does not carry which site the article belonged to, and it carries no API token. A .grafida file is safe to send to somebody else without handing them access to your site.

The same file is read and written by Grafida on Apple platforms and by Akeeba's older desktop Grafida, so an article can move between all three.