Book and Quill
Books and Quills are useful unwritten journals, which players may write in and read. Once signed and titled, they become uneditable Written Books.
Crafting
| Name | Ingredients | Input » Output | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book and Quill | Leather or Cut Leather, Ink Sac, Feather, Paper. |
|
Writing
By pressing the Use key (right click by default) while holding a Book and Quill in their hand, the Player will open the book and be able to enter text up to 50 pages long, with up to 256 characters per page (Note that line breaks, such as those created by pressing ↵ Enter, are counted as two characters). No page may be longer than 13 lines and each line can have, on average, 19 characters.
Note that you cannot yet move the cursor while writing into a book, so you cannot go back and fix a typo without deleting what you've written after it.
When signed, a book will have the name of the player who wrote it, or "Player" if signed while playing offline. The title of the book can be up to 16 characters long. Special characters can be used in the title, if typed from a keyboard which has them.
Special codes (coloring)
Text in a book can be styled using codes starting with the § character (section sign), which may be copied and pasted into the book. In Windows, you can type it in a text editor by holding Alt and pressing 0167 or holding alt and pressing 21 on your numpad. It can also be typed using AltGr + ⇧ Shift + s on the US International keyboard, AltGr + o on the Canadian Multilingual Standard keyboard, ⇧ Shift + 3 on all German (QWERTZ) keyboard layouts, ⌥ Opt+6 on Mac, or varying other shortcuts depending on locale and operating system.
- § + k creates randomly changing characters.
- § + l creates bold text.
- § + m creates text with a strikethrough.
- § + n creates underlined text.
- § + o creates italic text.
- § + 0 – f (hexadecimal) creates colored text. See Formatting Codes.
- § + r resets any of the previous styles so text after it appears normally.
To use multiple formatting codes, the color code must be used first: it will cancel out all preceding codes. If you use multiple codes, and continue typing past the end of a line, the next line will exhibit only the last formatting code used.
Most Unicode characters are available in books, and although alt-codes do not work, they may be pasted in without issue. One notable use of Unicode is fullwidth and small caps characters: in Minecraft, these appear as a different font altogether, which can be useful for titles or chapter headings. Converters exist which can take normal text and output fullwidth text, which can serve as a large convenience for those wishing to use it. Note that the font used in books is packaged with Minecraft itself, meaning a user's installed fonts do not affect which Unicode characters can be used or how they appear.
