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Settings

Grafida's options live on its own Settings screen, reached from the navigation drawer. Every control takes effect the moment you change it; there is nothing to save and nothing to cancel.

Interface language

Grafida speaks English (United Kingdom), English (United States), German, Greek, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese (Portugal).

Automatic follows your operating system's language and falls back to British English when it speaks none of the above. Choosing a language here overrides that.

The wording follows Joomla!'s own translations wherever the two talk about the same thing — an article, a category, a tag, an access level — so what you read here matches your site's administrator interface.

Note

Changing the language re-draws this screen at once. The rest of the interface picks the new language up the next time you start Grafida.

This documentation is English only, deliberately. It is one shared set of pages, and translating it is a separate undertaking from translating the interface.

Appearance

Follow system, Light or Dark. Follow system uses your device's own appearance setting.

Normalise AI-generated content

Text written or rewritten by an AI almost always carries characters you cannot see: zero-width spaces and joiners, left-to-right and right-to-left marks, the Unicode tag characters — which can spell out a whole hidden message one code point at a time — variation selectors, soft hyphens and several kinds of unusual space. Some of it is a deliberate watermark. Some of it is picked up simply by copying out of a web page, which does the same thing by accident.

It is worth removing for reasons that have nothing to do with watermarks:

  • A screen reader announces what it finds. Invisible characters are read out, or split a word in two, and the article stops making sense to the person listening to it.
  • A directional override can reverse the reading order of part of a sentence, showing a reader something other than what you wrote.
  • A soft hyphen or a zero-width space inside a word breaks find-in-page and site search for everybody, because the word no longer matches itself.

Grafida removes them from imported Markdown, and from the title, body and metadata of every article you publish. Your local copy is left alone as you work — the clean-up happens on the way out. That is why publishing is the moment that matters: it catches the text however it arrived, whether by an ordinary paste out of some AI tool's web page or from an article read back off the site.

The three choices:

  • Invisible marks and unusual spaces — the default. Also collapses no-break, thin, hair, ideographic and similar spaces onto an ordinary space.
  • Invisible marks only — leaves every space exactly as you typed it. Choose this if your typography needs those spaces: French punctuation is set with a no-break space before !, ?, : and ;, and Japanese and Chinese text uses the ideographic space. Neither is a watermark.
  • Off — touches nothing. This is the honest choice if you write right-to-left text and place directional marks deliberately, because Grafida treats those marks as watermark carriers.

Characters that carry meaning are kept in every mode: the joiners that hold an emoji sequence together, the tag characters that spell out a subdivision flag, and the joiners that Persian, Arabic and the Indic scripts need to shape their letters correctly.

Important

This does not conceal the fact that content was generated or processed by AI, and it is not meant to. Removing a watermark does not make text human-written, and there are many other ways the origin of a text can be established.

Nor does it relieve you of your responsibility to disclose the use of AI where the law requires it. The EU AI Act, and comparable rules in other jurisdictions, impose transparency and labelling obligations on AI-generated or AI-manipulated content — news articles being one prominent case — and editorial codes of practice frequently require the same. Complying with them is your responsibility, and no software setting can discharge it for you.

Reload on startup

Categories, tags, access levels, languages and custom fields are kept on this machine so that opening a site's articles is fast and works offline. With Reload on startup on, that local copy is discarded every time Grafida starts, so the next site you open is read fresh.

It is useful while you are actively changing categories or fields on a site. Leave it off on a slow or unreliable connection: the first screen that needs the data has to wait for the site to answer, which can take a while and looks as though Grafida has stopped responding.

You can always refresh one site's copy on demand with Reload metadata on the Articles screen.

Spell checking

Underlines misspelt words as you write, using your operating system's own spell checker. The language it checks against follows your system settings, not Grafida's. Turning it off only hides the underlines; it changes nothing about what you type.

Note

This one reaches an open article the next time you open it, not while you are in it. Changing it mid-article would mean restarting the editor, which would discard your undo history.

Close HTML tags for me

In the source code editor — see Editing the HTML source — finish HTML tags as you type them. It has no effect on the visual editor.

  • Opening and closing tags inserts the closing tag the moment you finish typing the opening one.
  • Closing tags only inserts nothing on its own; it completes a closing tag once you start typing one, which suits editing markup that already exists.
  • Off leaves tags exactly as you type them.

AI assistant

Turns every AI feature on or off. It is on by default.

With this off, the AI entry leaves the navigation drawer, the AI button leaves the article editor, and Grafida sends nothing to any AI provider. Your configured services, custom tools, edited system prompt and saved conversations are all kept, and come back exactly as they were when you turn this on again. See AI Assistant for what the feature does when it is on.

App Lock

Off by default. Lock Grafida asks you to authenticate when the application opens, and again when you come back to it after a minute or more elsewhere. Protected sites lists every connected site with a switch of its own, so a single sensitive site can be locked without locking the rest.

Turning any of these on or off asks you to authenticate first — a switch anybody holding your unlocked device could flip would not be a lock.

Grafida also blocks screenshots, screen recording and casting while any lock is on. Turn every lock off to allow them again.

Where the device has no PIN, pattern or password at all, Grafida cannot ask you to authenticate; it says so and opens rather than shutting you out of work that exists nowhere else. See App Lock for the whole picture.

About

About shows Grafida's version and a summary of its licence. See Legal Notices for the full picture.

Reset local storage

This permanently deletes every site, every local article, every stored picture and every stored API token from this machine, and returns Grafida to a clean, just-installed state. It cannot be undone.

Grafida asks twice. The second time it names exactly what it is about to delete — how many sites, how many local articles, how many pictures — so you can see what you are losing before you agree to it. Your choices on this Settings screen are left alone.

Warning

Export anything you want to keep as a .grafida file first — see Drafts and Files. Once local storage is reset, that is the only way to get an article back.

Where Grafida keeps its data

Grafida's database lives in the app's own private storage on the device — the same place every Android app keeps what belongs to it. You cannot browse it from a file manager, nothing else on the device can read it, and it is removed automatically if you uninstall Grafida.

Note

Grafida does not open, share or adopt the database of Akeeba's older desktop Grafida. The two applications have never kept their data in the same place, on any platform.

API tokens are not in that database. They live in the Android Keystore — see Requirements.