This manual follows the real authoring order and covers every capability Illuminate currently ships — follow it start to finish, or jump straight to the stage you care about.
The "New book" wizard walks through: first, topic, audience, tone and length (from short pieces to 100k+ word books); second, visual style and image density (Light / Standard / Rich, controlling roughly how many figures the book gets); third, a confirmation summary before generation starts.
Generation always produces a structured outline first — nothing is committed to full chapters until you approve it.
AI drafts a chapter-by-chapter outline. You edit titles, reorder, add or remove chapters — nothing is written until you confirm.
Image planning is content-driven: for each section, the system decides whether an illustration actually helps and what kind (portrait, diagram, scene, etc.), respecting the image density you chose at setup instead of forcing one image per chapter.
Generate one chapter at a time, with tone, terminology and context preserved across the whole book.
Any chapter can be regenerated, partially rewritten, or hand-edited — changes are tracked with version history.
Once chapter text is confirmed, generate every figure in the book with one click, or chapter-by-chapter — replacing placeholders as you go.
Any figure can be regenerated, swapped for a reference image, or have its prompt edited, and only counts as done once you approve it.
Upload and name reference photos of real people. When the AI illustrates that person elsewhere in the book, it automatically matches and references these photos to keep their appearance consistent throughout.
For scientists mentioned in popular-science books, the system automatically looks up a real Wikipedia photo as reference. If no reliable photo is found, it refuses to invent a likeness and falls back to a silhouette or workspace scene instead of a fabricated portrait.
Generates a cover matching the book's topic and style, with regeneration and manual adjustment, automatically embedded when you export.
12 built-in page sizes (A4, A5, Chinese 32K/16K, 6×9 in, etc., each with publisher-grade margins), 13 layout modes (textbook, picture book, magazine, academic paper, business report, and more), and 8 complete templates — each a full visual system covering heading fonts, sizes, line spacing and caption styling.
Your selection renders a live preview and drives both the PDF and Word export, so page size, fonts and spacing stay identical across formats.
Content-quality rules control the writing and editorial agents' strategy (e.g. strict length limits, requiring cited sources), applied on every generation and review pass.
Whole-book review checks structural logic, chapter transitions, tone consistency, text-image alignment and layout readiness — surfacing suggestions you can accept, edit or reject, never silently overwriting your content.
Scan the entire book with one click to surface duplicated or highly similar passages, so you can clean up redundant writing before export.
A pre-export checklist confirms readiness — template selected, chapter content confirmed, images generated, and any copyright items still pending review.
Both PDF and Word are generated from the template you chose on the Layout page, including cover, table of contents, captions and colophon; once a book has been reviewed, the Word filename is automatically marked "Revised".
Upload an existing Word, PDF, TXT or Markdown file to reconstruct it into the book's chapter structure — bring content you've already written into the layout and illustration workflow.
A central library of every generated or uploaded image, reusable across books and chapters without regenerating the same asset twice.