I’ve been using iA Writer to edit my MarkDown files on my iPad, and I’m really happy with how straightforward it is.

One of their newest features, Authorship, is a game-changer for collaborating. It lets you easily track who wrote what. Imagine having a friend or even ChatGPT help with a section of your article. This feature visually distinguishes your writing from theirs, making edits and tracking contributions a breeze. While I don’t use AI assistance much yet, this feature has piqued my interest for future projects.

The Catch

There’s a slight hiccup with this feature. When enabled, iA Writer adds a hidden “Authorship” section at the end of your document. It’s invisible within the iA Writer interface but pops up in other editors.

This presents a problem for my workflow. I write my blog posts in iA Writer, push them to GitHub using Working Copy, and finally, Hugo transforms them into my static website. If I don’t manually remove this hidden section, Hugo (or similar static site generators) will unknowingly publish it on my website – definitely not ideal!

Exploring Solutions

I reached out to the iA team on Mastodon about this issue, and they told me, it turns out there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

While I understand it’s a tricky situation, I believe there’s room for improvement. Here are a couple of thoughts:

External File Storage

Storing this authorship data in a separate file would simplify its exclusion during website generation. However, this could lead to data management challenges by scattering information.

Leveraging YAML Metadata

Integrating the Authorship data as metadata within the existing YAML structure could be a winning solution. iA Writer users are already accustomed to YAML metadata, and static site generators typically disregard unfamiliar metadata, preventing unintended publishing.

A Temporary Fix for Hugo Users

As we await potential solutions from iA, I’ve created a script to remove these Authorship blocks from your MarkDown files:

Keep in mind that this will remove all Authorship blocks, even those within code blocks. Feel free to refine it further.

In Conclusion

iA Writer’s Authorship feature is a fantastic addition for managing collaborative writing. However, its integration with static site generators requires attention.

I encourage fellow users to provide constructive feedback to iA at support+newfeature@ia.net.

For those familiar with GitHub, you can directly contribute to the discussion on their repository: repository.