Novelwriter

**Features**

* A project can now be opened from the command line by providing the project path to the launching
script. PRs 164 and 166.

**User Interface**

* Added functionality to split a document into a folder of multiple documents, and also to merge a
folder of documents into a single document. PRs 159 and 163.
* It is now possible to permanently delete files from the Trash folder. This can be done
file-by-file or by using the Empty Trash option in the menu. PRs 159 and 163.
* When running the spell checker, a wait cursor is displayed. This will alert the user that
novelWriter is working on something when, for instance, a very large document is opened and
initial spell checking is running. PR 158.

**Bug Fixes**

* Fixed a few keyboard shortcuts that were not working in distraction free mode. PR 157.
* Added a check to ensure the user does not drag and drop an item into the Orphaned Items folder.
Since this folder is not an actual project item, novelWriter would crash when trying to change
the dropped item's parent item to the Orphaned Items folder. Now, instead, the drop event is
cancelled if the target folder is Orphaned Items. PR 163.

**Code Improvements**

* The way project files are saved has been altered slightly. When a project file or document file
is saved, the data is first streamed to a temp file. Then the old storage file is renamed to
.bak, and and the temp file is renamed to the correct storage file name. This ensures that the
storage file is only replaced after a complete and successful write. PR 165.
* The cache folder has been removed. It was used to store the 10 most recent versions of the
project file. Instead, the previous project file is renamed to .bak, and can be restored if
opening from the latest project file fails. Any additional restore capabilities should be ensured
by backup solutions, either the internal simple zip backup, or other third party tools. PR 165.
* The dependency on the Python package `appdirs` has been dropped. It was used only for extracting
the path to the user's config folder, a feature which is also provided by Qt. PR 169.

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* Botched release. Replaced with 0.4.5.

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**User Interface**

* Added keyboard shortcuts and menu entries for formatting headers, comments, and removing block
formats. PR 155.
* Disable re-highlighting of open file when resizing window. This is potentially a slow process if
the spell checker is on and the file is large. There is no need to do this just for reflowing
text, so it is now disabled on resize events. Issue 150, PR 153.
* Improved the speed of the syntax highlighter by about 40% by not using regular expressions for
highlighting block formats and by skipping empty lines entirely. PR 154.

**Bug Fixes**

* Fixed an issue when closing the import file dialog without selecting a file, the import would
proceed, but fail on file not found. The import is now cancelled when there is no file selected.
PR 149.
* Fixed an issue with markdown export where it did not take into account hard line breaks. Issue
151, PR 152.
* Fixed a crash when running file status check when the project contains orphaned files. PR 152.

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**User Interface**

* Distraction free mode now also hides the menu bar, but all keyboard shortcuts used for editing
remain active. The rest are disabled. PR 142.

**Bug Fixes**

* Fixed various issues with spell checking highlighting. The highlighting and the editor didn't
always agree on what words were spelled wrong. PR 141.
* The status bar now shows what spell checking language is actually loaded. Previously, it just
showed the language selected in the settings. That was a bit misleading as the available
dictionaries can change due to the change in installed dictionary on the system. PR 145.

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**Features**

* If no external spell check package is available, novelWriter can now fall back to use a simple
spell checker based on word similarity comparison provided by the Python standard package
`difflib`. That means spell checking is always available, although the difflib-based spell
checker is both slow and lacks many features of other packages. This feature comes with a general
English dictionary, and a GB and US dictionary. These are just lists of correct words provided by
aspell. PR 130.
* Language information (spell checker) is now shown on the status bar. In addition, the timer has
been converted to monospace font and received an icon. PR 136.
* The new icons exist in both dark and neutral mode, and the mode can be set in the preferences.
This makes it easier to see the icons on a dark system theme. PR 135.
* Distraction free mode, key shortcut `F8`, and full screen mode, shortcut `F11`, are now
available. This PR also fixes some issues with rescaling of text margins when windows or panels
are resized. PR 137.

**User Interface**

* Most text boxes now have a character limit. Before, the only limit was the limit set by Qt itself
of ~32k characters. PR 126.
* Key combination `Ctrl+G` is now an alternative to `F3`, forward search, and vice versa for
backwards search. This makes more sense on macOS. Issue 124, PR 126.
* The shortcut for the replace feature is now `Cmd+=` on macOS, and remains `Ctrl+H` on Linux and
Windows. Issue 124, PR 126.
* The sample project in the source code has been improved to better show the features of
novelWriter as they currently are. The old text was a bit out of date. The new text also explains
the features it demonstrates. PR 132.

**Bug Fixes**

* Fixed a bug where a long file label would expand the tree pane due to the details panel
expanding. The label itself will no longer show more than 100 characters, and is word wrapped.
Issue 120, PR 122.

**Code Improvements**

* The code has been reorganised, import headers been cleaned up, and the code made more or less
PEP8 compliant. PRs 118, 119, and 138.
* The dependency on the `pycountry` package has been dropped. The feature based on it now uses an
internal list of country codes for describing spell checker languages. PR 129.
* The themes manager has been improved, and the loading of icons now supports a number of fallback
steps to ensure something is shown in most cases. The final fallback is the system's own icon
theme. PR 135.

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**Features**

* The export dialog now allows limited support for exports using Pandoc. The Pandoc conversion is
run as a stage two of the export process. Pandoc integration is fickly on Windows, but works well
on Linux. PRs 82 and 104.
* The editor now supports Markdown standard hard line breaks, and exports these correctly to the
various file formats and to the document view pane. Hard line breaks can be inserted by either
appending two or more spaces to the end of a line, or by pressing `Shift+Enter`. PR 83.
* The editor now supports and preserves non-breaking spaces. Unfortunately, the preservation of
these spaces on save and reload is dependent on Qt 5.9 or later. Non-breaking spaces are
preserved on export to html and LaTeX. PR 87.
* An option to show tabs/spaces and line endings in the document editor has been added to the
Preferences dialog. PR 90.
* The document view pane now has a "Referenced By" panel at the bottom, showing links to all
documents referring back to the document being viewed. The panel is collapsible, and has a sticky
option that will prevent it from updating if links are followed. PRs 109 and 110.
* The tag and reference system no longer has any restrictions on file class. That is, any file can
have tags and references, and they are indexed by the indexer and displayed as links in the
document view pane. The timeline view behaves as before, only listing active Novel files.
PR 114.
* A new root folder type and keyword for "Entities" has been added. These can be useful for
describing plot elements fitting under such a category. PR 115.

**User Interface**

* Tags and references in the editor are now "clickable" in the sense that pressing `Ctrl+Enter`
with the cursor on them will open the reference in the view pane. PR 98.
* Warnings triggered when the user tries to use features with missing package dependencies will now
provide a link to the package website. PR 86.
* Adding the `~` character in file path boxes is now expanded to the user's home directory. PR 94.
* The recent projects submenu no longer has a number prefix, and a "Clear Recent Projects" option
has been added. PRs 86 and 94.
* Syntax themes based on Night Owl and Light Owl themes have been added. PR 97.
* Read-only files now have a notification popping up at the top of the edit pane, and the files are
actually not editable. PR 106.
* Tabs are now properly exported in formats where this makes sense. For plain text files, a tab is
converted to four spaces. For html exports they are converted to a long space, equivalent to four
spaces. PR 113.
* A toggle button in the Document menu now allows displaying file comments in the document view
panel. PR 115.

**Bug Fixes**

* Some issues with unicode conversion and LaTeX export have been addressed, but the escaping of
unicode characters is prone to errors. The user should be careful with using special symbols if
export to LaTeX is intended. The package `latexcodec` should be able to handle Latin based,
language specific characters. PRs 73 and 79.
* Fixed some long-standing issues with running novelWriter on Windows. The config folder requires a
set of two folders to be created on first use, which the config class did not expect. This is now
resolved. In addition, Python does not default to utf-8 when writing files on Windows, so all
open statements now have encoding defined. Failing to open files also had the risk of truncating
them. This has been avoided by distinguishing new files from broken files. PR 81.
* Dark theme was not rendering properly on multiple platforms. This was resolved by forcing the Qt5
style to "Fusion", which allows further formatting by the novelWriter themes code. The user can
override the Qt styling option through the `--style=` flag on the command line. PR 96.
* The behaviour of files in the Trash folder has been fixed. These are now read only. PR 106.
* Fixed a bug where the last line of a title or partition page would be ignored on export. PR 113.
* Drag and drop onto the root level of the tree has been disabled. This was anyway only allowed for
root folder items, but it was tricky to enforce this properly for other files. In order to move
root folders around now, the move up and down features need to be used instead. 115.

**Installation**

* A script for `pyinstaller` has been added, making it possible to generate standalone executables
of novelWriter on at least Windows and Linux. PR 91.
* novelWriter has been made `pip install` ready. PRs 107 and 108.

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