Release Notes
This is a beta release of the next release version, and is intended for testing purposes. Please be
careful when using this version on live writing projects, and make sure you take frequent backups.
Please check the changelog for an overview of changes. The full release notes will be added to the
final release.
Detailed Changelog
**Features**
* novelWriter has a new logo and icon. PR 1593.
* The Document Editor is now a true plain text editor. This has a number of benefits and a couple
of drawbacks. The most important benefits is that the editor responds a lot faster, and can hold
much larger text documents. The big document limit has therefore been removed. It mostly affected
automatic spell checking. The syntax highlighter and spell checker are also more efficient, which
allows for needed improvements to these. The drawbacks are mainly that the editor now scrolls one
line at a time, instead of scrolling pixel by pixel like before. PRs 1521 and 1525.
* Tags and References are now case insensitive. Their display name on the user interface remains
the same as the value set for the `tag` entry. Issue 1313. PRs 1522 and 1578.
* Keywords for Tags and References, and the References themselves, now have an auto-complete menu
that pops up in the editor on lines starting with the `` character. It will first suggest what
keyword you want to use, and when it has been added, use that keyword to look up suggestions for
references to add. The suggestions improve as you type by looking for the characters you've
already typed in the tags you've previously defined. Issue 823. PR 1581.
* You can now right-click an undefined tag, and a context menu option to create a Project Note for
that tag will appear in the menu. On selection, it will create a note in the first root folder of
the correct kind, and set the title and tag to match the undefined reference, making it instantly
defined. Issues 1580 and 823. PR 1582.
* Shortcodes have been added to the Document Editor. Shortcodes are HTML-like syntax, but uses
square brackets instead of angular brackets. So `[b]text[/b]` will make the word "text" appear as
bold. Shortcodes currently support bold, italic, strike trough, underline, superscript and
subscript text. The first three are complimentary to the Markdown-like syntax that. The benefit
of the shortcode emphasis syntax, however, is that it does not care about word boundaries, and
can therefore be used any place in the text. Including in the middle of words. Issues 1337 and
1444. PRs 1540 and 1583.
* A show/hide toolbar has been added to the editor where tool buttons for formatting options are
available. The toolbar is hidden by default, but can be activated from a three dots icon in the
top left corner of the editor. Issue 1585. PR 1584.
* Build Definitions in the Manuscript Build tool can now be re-ordered, and the order is preserved
when the tool is closed and re-opened. Issue 1542. PR 1591.
**Usability**
* The Settings menu in the sidebar now always pops out to the right and upwards from the bottom of
the icon. The previous behaviour was not guaranteed to stay in the visible area of the screen.
PR 1520.
* The right click action on a misspelled word now uses the actual spell checker data for lookup.
Previously, the spell checker would underline a word that was misspelled, but the right click
action actually had no way of reading where the error line was, so it had to guess again what
word the user was clicking. Since these two parts of the code used different logic, they
sometimes produced different results. The spell checker now saves the location of each spell
check error, and the right click action retrieves this data when generating suggestions, which
should eliminate the problem of picking the correct word boundaries. Issue 1532. PR 1525.
* The language of a project is not set in the New Project Wizard and in Project Settings. It is no
longer defined in the Build Settings panel. Issue 1588. PR 1589.
* The way switching focus and view in the main GUI has changed. Pressing `Ctrl+T` will now switch
focus to the Project or Novel Tree if focus is elsewhere, or if either have focus already, it
will switch view to the other tree. Pressing `Ctrl+E` will switch focus and view to the Document
Editor. Pressing `Ctrl+Shift+T` will do the same for the Outline View. The old Alt-based
shortcuts have been removed. Issues 1310 and 1291. PR 1590.
**User Interface**
* The labels under the sidebar buttons have been removed. The tool tips have the necessary
information. PR 1520.
**Other Improvements**
* Also the Tags and References keywords are now translated into the project language when these are
included in Manuscript builds. As long as the phrases have been translated. PR 1586.
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