Novelwriter

Release Notes

This is a bugfix release that fixes two issues. One related to the Project Details dialog missing
its translated labels for non-English languages, and a fix concerning switching focus to the
project tree when the Novel tab is visible. If the Novel tab is selected, the focus shift now
correctly gives focus to the Novel tree.

Detailed Changelog

**Bugfixes**

* The Project Details dialog source file was previously in the wrong source code folder, and was
moved to the correct location in the previous release. However, the translation framework still
pointed to the old location. The reference has been fixed and the missing translation strings
restored.
* Pressing the `Alt+1` key to switch focus to the Project Tree while the Novel Tree was in focus
would still give focus to the Project Tree, which would be invisible. The focus is now correctly
given to the Novel Tree when the tab is visible. Issue 913.

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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.

Detailed Changelog

**Bugfixes**

* Fix an inconsistency on the minimum required version of Qt and PyQt between the config files and
the code. PR 846.
* Ensure that an item's status setting is parsed after its class when parsing the main project
XML. This is just a precaution as the XML writing function always writes the class setting first.
PR 852.
* On Windows, the Python icon is shown on the task bar when novelWriter is run directly from code.
This has now been fixed by setting a unique application ID. Issue 860. PR 861.

**Open Document Exports**

* The ODT file writer class has been improved, and the code that writes out paragraphs and header
section to the XML has been completely rewritten. The new algorithm is more robust and follows
the open document standard more closely. It still diverts from the standard in a few cases, but
these are the same points where Open Office and Libre Office diverts. Issue 783. PR 843.
* The previous exporter class would sometimes insert additional line breaks in the generated XML
for paragraphs. This does not break with the open document standard, but it was unintentional and
trivial to fix. PR 843.
* Some final clean-up was included in PR 859.

**Novel Layouts**

* All novel layouts, that is "TITLE", "PAGE", "BOOK", "PARTITION", "UNNUMBERED", "CHAPTER" and
"SCENE" have been merged into a single layout "DOCUMENT". The "NOTE" layout remains unchanged.
The special formatting of level one header on the title page and chapter headers for unnumbered
chapters is now handled by a modified header formatting code. Issue 835. PR 837.
* A formatting code for manually inserting page breaks in the text has been added. In the process,
similar codes were added to insert vertical spaces in the text. Issue 835. PRs 837 and 848.
* Dropping the layouts also triggered several changes to how project items are now displayed. The
difference between document types is now indicated with a combination of icons and item label
emphasis. The last column in the project tree also now only shows the item status or importance,
not item class and layout. The Item Details panel below the tree has also been updated to show
a usage description instead of layout as the last entry. Issue 835. PRs 847, 849 and 852.

**Other Features**

* A warning will pop up when you launch an alpha version of novelWriter. Since the main branch is
now also the development branch, people may run novelWriter directly from source without checking
out a release version. Alpha versions are not considered stable. PR 844.
* Two new settings have been added to Preferences. One to control how much information is shown in
the last column of the project tree, and one to control whether emphasis is used to indicate
which novel documents contain a level one or two header. PRs 847 and 852.
* The label on the first column of the project and novel trees have been renamed to "Project Tree"
and "Novel Outline", respectively. PR 852.
* The Help > User Manual (Online) menu entry sends you to the online documentation, and the local
documentation is handled by Help > User Manual (PDF), replacing the old Qt Assistant
implementation. PRs 856, 859 and 862.

**Documentation**

* The documentation has been updated and extended to cover the new layout behaviour and to provide
information and instruction on how to update the project with the new formats. PRs 850, 851 and
855.
* The technical section of the documentation has been updated, and information on how to run tests
has been added. PR 859.

**Code Improvements**

* The loading and saving of user preferences in the config class has been improved a bit and the
code modernised to the current recommended practice for the ConfigParser module. PR 826.
* The index class has been improved. Some data fields that were not being used have been dropped.
In addition, a new function has been added that provides a custom indentation scheme for JSON
files. The default indentation inserts far too many line breaks. The new function only indents up
to a certain level. Indenting the JSON files is useful for people who use version control
software on their projects. The limited indentation scheme reduces the number of diff lines as
well as reduces the overall file size. PR 840.

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Release Notes

This is a patch release fixing an issue with the auto-replace feature for single and double quotes.
The issue appears when using the new indent and text alignment codes followed by a quote symbol,
and quotes following a tab or non-breaking space.

**Bugfixes**

* Any single or double straight quote following a whitespace other than a regular space, or a left
indent or right align set of angle bracket codes without a space following them, would be
erroneously replaced by a closing quote instead of an opening quote. Issue 874.

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Release Notes

This release fixes a couple of minor issue with some of the dialog boxes. The fix was accidentally
left out of release 1.4.

Detailed Changelog

**Bugfixes**

* The way margins are determined in the paged dialogs used many places, including Preferences, has
been improved. These margins would sometimes be set to zero when they shouldn't. PR 834.
* Dialogs that are non-modal are no longer duplicated when opened multiple times. Instead, the
existing dialog is moved to the front. PR 834.

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Release Notes

This is a preview release of novelWriter 1.4. It contains some new features and a lot of code
refactoring. This release is a testing release, and may contain bugs. Please be careful when using
this version to work on your projects.

Detailed Changelog

**Bugfixes**

* A number of calls for the pop-up alert box were missing translation wrappers. That means they
could not be translated into other languages. The alerts have been fixed, but the PR does not add
the missing translations. PR 806.
* A duplicate error message from the index class has been removed. PR 758.

**Features**

* Single line breaks are now treated as proper line breaks within paragraphs. Paragraphs are still
separated by two line breaks like before. This means that it is no longer necessary to leave two
spaces at the end of the line to force a line break. This is a rather obscure and little known
feature taken from Markdown, and it isn't very intuitive. Issue 785. PR 786.
* It is now possible to specify text alignment and additional indentation on individual paragraphs
in the text. Both features use a similar syntax that I hope is fairly intuitive. Menu entries and
keyboard shortcuts have also been added to make it easier to use these features. Issues 595 and
803. PR 804.

**Code Improvements**

* Class initialisation has been made consistent. All GUI classes now inherit the main window as its
parent class, and all other classes inherit the main project class as its parent. Since the
project class and the main window class have pointers to each other, all needed pointers are
available from their respective classes. PR 758.
* The document class has been changed from a reusable class to a class that is intended to wrap a
single document via its handle. The class was originally written for the document editor where
the reusable approach made more sense. But it is much simple to create and destroy them in other
parts of the code when they are not reusable. PRs 758 and 760.
* The document class no longer generates any pop-up alerts. Errors are recorded and retrieved and
displayed by the parent or caller class. PR 758.
* Refactored the code of the editor class to make it more isolated by making most class variables
private. PR 779.
* Made similar changes to the viewer class and item details class. PR 780.

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Release Notes

This patch release fixes a potential file encoding issue when running setup on Windows, and a minor
issue with the project word count not being updated immediately when a file is deleted. In
addition, the keyboard shortcuts to change focus between the project tree, the editor, the viewer,
and the outline panel, have been changed for Windows users. They keyboard shortcuts were
interfering with the Alt codes used for special characters. The shortcuts are unchanged for Linux
and macOS.

Detailed Changelog

**Bugfixes**

* Fix an issue with file encoding when extracting version information from the source code during
setup on Windows. This seems to be a limited issue, but the changes make the relevant function
more fault tolerant. Issue 805. PR 807.
* The project word count on the status bar was not always updated when a file was permanently
deleted from the project. This has now been resolved. Issue 799. PR 810.
* The keyboard shortcuts to change focus will on Windows interfere with the alt key codes as the
focus shortcuts used `Alt+` to `Alt+4`. On Windows, these are now instead `Ctrl+Alt+1` to
`Ctrl+Alt+4`. Part of issue 740. PR 808.

**Source Code**

* Remove a redundant line in the source code. PR 802.
* Make the XML parse for project items a little less panicky when encountering unexpected XML tags.
Generally, this shouldn't be a problem, but the XML parser should silently ignore unexpected tags
when parsing the project file. This may occur if a project is opened in an earlier version of
novelWriter. If so, a warning is issued anyway, so it is safe to disregard unrecognised tags as
the user has already actively selected to proceed and been sufficiently warned. PR 809.

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