2024: Year in Review

Year in Review

Happy New Year! As we begin another year of making Vellum even better for you, we like to reflect on what we released in the previous year. So in case you missed them, here are some of the new features we added to Vellum in 2024:

Footnotes

Vellum 3.7 brought one of our most requested features: footnotes! In your print edition, footnotes appear at the bottom of each page, indicated by your choice of symbols or numbers. You can include footnotes in the Word file you import, or add them right in Vellum.

Vellum Text Editor with Emoji picker active

Emojis 😀

With Vellum 3.8, it’s now easy to add emojis anywhere in your book, including Text Conversations. For ebooks, Vellum ensures that emojis can be seen on every platform (including Kindle!). For print, Vellum offers a choice of emoji fonts, with one designed for black and white.

Diagram of new trim sizes available

New Trim Sizes

Vellum now supports larger trim sizes like 7 × 10 and 8.5 × 11 as well as smaller sizes like 4 × 6. You’ll now find 24 trim sizes in Vellum, including international sizes for BoD, Bookelis, and Tolino.

Text Editor in Vellum showing a multi-level list and a popup with control over bullets

New List Options

Lists became much more powerful in Vellum 3.8, with additions including:

  • Multiple levels of list items (up to five!)
  • Choice of list labels, including a. b. c. and i. ii. iii.
  • Continuing numbering from a previous list
Two written notes with different handwriting styles and the Variant control used to adjust these

Written Note Variants

The new Variant control, added in Vellum 3.8, lets you use distinct styles for notes in your book. With Variants, you can give each character their own writing style, and choose from an expanded set of fonts.

Also in 2024

In addition to those major features, we also made these improvements:

  • An all-new Preview menu with sizing controls and commands to sync with the Text Editor
  • Expanded Bleed settings to configure Full Bleed for BookVault, Tolino, and more 
  • Easier Heading Background layout with the new Full Bleed Scale controls
  • Built-in generation of Image Templates for Full Page Images and Heading Backgrounds

More to Come!

All of these features were released in 2024 as free updates. If you don’t yet have Vellum, you can download from vellum.pub (requires macOS Monterey or newer).

We have more to come in 2025. As always, the features we add are inspired by your feedback, so if you have an idea for something that will make it even easier to create beautiful books, let us know!