Help & Documentation

bbly. is a spatial document drafting tool. Instead of writing linearly from top to bottom, you place content bubbles wherever they belong on a canvas — side by side, stacked, spread across pages. The layout you see on screen is exactly what gets exported to PDF.

When you open a new document you'll see the lavender canvas with a set of guide bubbles that explain the core interactions. You can dismiss them at any time by clicking the Start fresh — clear guide pill at the bottom of the canvas, or simply by drawing your first real bubble.

Your document is saved automatically to the cloud every time you make a change. There is no Save button — every edit is persisted in the background within half a second.

Bubbles are the fundamental building blocks of every bbly. document. Each bubble is an independent, resizable container for rich text content.

Creating a bubble — click and drag anywhere on the empty canvas. Release the mouse once the bubble is the size you want. Bubbles must be at least 40 × 30 px to be created.

Moving a bubble — drag it from anywhere inside its body. While dragging, smart alignment guides appear as thin purple lines when the bubble's edges or centre align with any other bubble or the page centre axis.

Resizing a bubble — use the resize handles:

• Edge pills (top, bottom, left, right) — resize a single axis. The opposite edge stays fixed.
• Corner handle ⤡ (bottom-right) — resize both width and height simultaneously.
• Hold ⇧ Shift while dragging an edge pill — vertically centre-resize (both top and bottom edges move symmetrically around the midpoint).
• Hold ⌥ Option / Alt while dragging an edge pill — horizontally centre-resize (both left and right edges move around the midpoint).

Deleting a bubble — click the × handle in the top-right corner of any focused bubble.

Bubble colours — five colour schemes are available (indigo, emerald, pink, amber, violet). The colour chip in the toolbar changes the active bubble's palette. Colour is purely decorative and does not affect the PDF export.

Bubbles snap to the edges of their neighbours automatically when you drag them close. This makes it easy to create flush, aligned layouts without manually measuring positions.

Click on any bubble to focus it — the text cursor activates immediately and you can start typing. A two-row rich text toolbar appears above the focused bubble with all formatting options.

Toolbar — row 1:

• Font family — choose from Inter, Roboto, Poppins, Playfair Display, Merriweather, and more.
• Font size — type any value or use the ± buttons. Changes apply to the whole bubble's base size.
• Line height — controls the spacing between lines. Useful for dense legal text vs. display headings.
• B / I / U / S — bold, italic, underline, strikethrough. Applied to the current selection.
• Text colour — opens a colour picker for the selected text.
• Highlight colour — applies a background colour to the selected text.
• Link — wraps the selection in a hyperlink.
• Clear formatting — removes all inline styles from the selection.

Toolbar — row 2:

• Alignment — left, centre, right, justify.
• Bullet list / numbered list — standard list formatting.
• Indent / outdent — increase or decrease paragraph indentation.

bbly. supports two canvas modes: freeform and paper.

In freeform mode the canvas is an open lavender field with no fixed dimensions — ideal for brainstorming and drafting without worrying about page breaks.

In paper mode the canvas becomes one or more white pages with a configurable physical size. Paper mode is required for PDF export that matches exact print dimensions.

Choosing a paper format — open the format selector in the right sidebar. Available presets include:

• A4 Portrait (210 × 297 mm) — the default for most documents
• A4 Landscape (297 × 210 mm)
• A3 Portrait (297 × 420 mm)
• A3 Landscape (420 × 297 mm)
• Custom — enter any width and height in millimetres

Multi-page documents — use the Add page button in the right sidebar. Pages are displayed stacked vertically. Each bubble belongs to exactly one page; you can drag bubbles between pages by moving them across the page boundary.

When a bubble's content is taller than the space available above the bottom margin, the overflowing text is automatically shown as a ghost at the top of the next page. This is a live visual preview — no duplicate bubble is created. Ghosts appear within the margin boundaries of the next page.

bbly. is designed to be fast with the keyboard. The most important shortcuts are:

On Windows and Linux, substitute Ctrl for ⌘ Cmd and Alt for ⌥ Option in all shortcuts above.

Variables let you create reusable placeholders inside your bubble content. Any text wrapped in double curly braces — {{ClientName}} — becomes a variable that can be filled in from the Variables sidebar without editing the bubble directly.

How to use variables:

• Type {{VariableName}} anywhere in a bubble's text. Variable names are case-sensitive.
• Open the Variables panel in the right sidebar. All detected variables are listed automatically.
• Type a value next to each variable name. The substitution is shown live in the bubble — the template syntax stays in the source so you can re-use the same document for different clients.
• Unfilled variables are shown with a yellow highlight on the canvas so they are easy to spot before exporting.
• When you export to PDF, variable tokens are replaced by their filled values and highlights are stripped from the output.

The Bubble Library lets you save any bubble as a reusable snippet and drag it into future documents. It is accessible from both the right sidebar in the editor and from the Library page in your dashboard.

Saving a bubble to the library:

• Focus a bubble, then click the bookmark icon in the toolbar or right-click the bubble and choose Save to library.
• Give the snippet a name and optionally assign it to a category.
• The snippet saves the bubble's content, font, size, line height, dimensions, and colour.

Using a saved snippet:

• Open the Library panel in the right sidebar. Filter by category using the tabs at the top.
• Drag a snippet from the library onto the canvas. It is placed at the drop position with its saved dimensions.

Managing categories — create custom categories from the Library dashboard page. Categories are synced to your account and appear in both the editor and the dashboard. You can move snippets between categories, rename categories, or delete a category (its snippets are moved to Uncategorised).

Free accounts can save up to 5 library snippets. Pro and Team plans have unlimited library storage.

Click the Export PDF button in the top bar to generate a PDF of your document. The export uses a server-side rendering pipeline that faithfully reproduces the canvas layout — font families, sizes, line heights, text colours, highlights, and exact bubble positions are all preserved.

Before exporting you can preview the output in the Export Preview panel. The preview shows each page with the same overflow ghost behaviour as the editor — content that crosses a bottom margin continues at the top margin of the next page.

Things to know before exporting:

• The document must be in paper mode. Freeform documents cannot be exported to PDF because there are no fixed page dimensions.
• Variable tokens are substituted with their filled values in the export. Unfilled variables appear as blank space.
• Content outside the margin area (if margin lock is on) is hidden in the export — the same masks that you see in the editor are applied to the PDF.
• Google Fonts used in the document are embedded server-side so the PDF looks identical regardless of which fonts are installed on the reader's device.
• The exported file is a searchable PDF — text inside bubbles is selectable and copy-pasteable.

Margins define the safe area inside each page. They are visible in paper mode as a dashed guide rectangle. You can configure the margin size for each page from the right sidebar — either uniformly (all four sides equal) or individually (top, right, bottom, left).

Margin lock — click the small padlock icon in the top-right corner of the margin guide to lock the margins. When locked:

• The padlock turns purple to indicate the locked state.
• You cannot draw new bubbles outside the margin area.
• Existing bubbles cannot be dragged or resized beyond the margin boundary.
• Content that bleeds into the margin zone is masked on screen and in the PDF export — it is not visible in the output.

Overflow ghosts — when a bubble's content is taller than the space between its top edge and the bottom margin, the overflow is shown as a ghost at the top of the next page. The ghost starts at the top margin of the next page and shows only the portion of the bubble that did not fit on the previous page. This behaviour applies to both the editor canvas and the PDF export.

Margin lock is independent per document and is saved with autosave. You can toggle it at any time without moving any bubbles.