Novelwriter

Release Notes

This is a bugfix release that fixes a rare problem causing novelWriter to crash if the spell
checker language setting was configured to an empty value.

A few other minor issues have also been fixed: The project language setting is now properly
exported to ODT documents. Spaces are no longer inserted automatically in front of colons in
certain meta data settings when the feature is enabled (it is primarily used for French). Lastly,
the slider splitting the editor and viewer panels can no longer be dragged until the viewer
disappears. It was not necessarily obvious how the viewer panel could be restored in such cases.

Detailed Changelog

**Bugfixes**

* Fixed an issue where the project language setting was not exported when building Open Document
files. Issue 1073. PR 1087.
* Fixed an issue where the splitter in the main window could be dragged until it hid the document
viewer panel. This is no longer possible. Issue 1085. PR 1087.
* Fixed an issue where an empty spell check language setting would crash novelWriter. Issue 1096.
PR 1098.
* Added a checker that blocks the automatic insertion of spaces in front of special characters in
the cases where the character is a colon in either a meta tag, or as part of the synopsis
keyword. This feature is used for certain languages like French and Spanish. Issue 1090.
PR 1099.

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Release Notes

This is a bugfix release that fixes a couple of minor issues. Projects containing one or more empty
documents would trigger a rebuild of the index each time the project was opened. This has now been
fixed. Another fix resolves an error message being written to the console logging output when a new
document was created. Both errors were harmless.

Detailed Changelog

**Bugfixes**

* Fixed an issue where projects containing empty documents would trigger an index rebuild on open,
but the empty document would be skipped due to a check that skips empty documents. As a
consequence, the index would be rebuilt each time the project was opened. Empty documents are now
added to the index, resolving this issue. Issue 1020. PR 1022.
* Fixed an issue where the shasum calculation would be performed when a new document was created,
which would fail as the file did not yet exist. The error was handled, but an error message was
printed to the console log. The shasum is now no longer called if the file doesn't already exist.
Issue 1021. PR 1023.

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Release Notes

This is a bugfix and patch release that fixes two recursion/loop issues. One would potentially
cause a crash if the window was resized rapidly, and one would cause a hang with certain search
parameters in the editor's search box. The Latin American Spanish translation has also been
updated.

Detailed Changelog

**Installation**

* When using the new installer on Windows, the project file mime type icon path would not be
correctly configured in registry. The correct path is now used. PR 1006.

**Internationalisation**

* The Latin American Spanish translation has been updated with two missing translation strings.
PR 1017.

**Bugfixes**

* Fix a bug where rapidly resizing the main window could trigger the recursion detector in Python
if done on a slower system. The actual issue may be a race condition or similar, and the change
made at least makes it harder to trigger. PR 1007.
* With some document searches, it was possible to trigger an infinite loop in the function that
counts results. It seems to be caused by the QTextEdit widget's find function returning a
successful result status, but no actual result selection. The fix will now write a warning to the
log and exit in such cases. The number of results is also now capped at 1000. Issue 1015.
PR 1016.

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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.

Please check the changelog for an overview of changes. The full release notes will be added to the
final release.

Detailed Changelog

**Features**

* When text is selected in the editor, the word counter in the editor's footer bar shows the number
of selected words instead of the total document word count. Feature Request 896. PR 899.
* The way page breaks are automatically and manually added has been improved: The Title format no
longer has an automatic page break, Partition and Chapter formats now always have a page break,
Scene and Section headers can now have page breaks added manually, and empty scene header format
will now result in a larger gap between scenes. Feature Request 912. PR 916.
* The Enter, Return and Ctrl+O keyboard shortcuts now open the selected document or item on the
tree that has focus. That is, on the Project Tree, Novel Tree, or in the Outline Tab. Previously,
these key strokes only affected the Project Tree. Feature Request 913. PR 945.
* The search tool in the document editor now shows the number of search results when the search
button is clicked. When the replace tool is used, this number changes if the search result does.
Feature Request 645. PRs 946 and 947.

**Other Changes**

* The icon themes have been merged and reduced to two complete themes, and the Preferences switch
for additional dark icons has been removed. The user either selects the Typicons Dark or Light
theme. No need to match further settings. PR 893.
* Custom GUI themes and syntax themes can now be loaded from the user's data path. The actual
storage path is determined by the OS. Part of Feature Request 892. PR 893.
* A number of text messages and labels on the GUI have been improved. Issue 923. PR 926.
* The switch in Preferences to disable fixed width text in the editor has been removed. Instead,
the user just sets the fixed with setting to 0 to disable it. The settings is now also applied to
the document viewer as well. Issue 924. PR 943.
* The Open Document export file produced from the build tool is now more LibreOffice and OpenOffice
friendly by using the same default styles as these editors do. Issue 948. PR 949.
* When a document is saved from the document editor, the disk on file is checked for external
changes before it is overwritten. Such changes can arise from editing the file from another tool
at the same time, from file sync issues, or even from file system issues. If an inconsistency is
discovered, the user is asked to confirm the overwrite. Issue 878. PR 890.

**Internationalisation**

* A couple of missing translations, and typos, have been fixed. PRs 921 and 926.
* Latin American Spanish translation has been added by Tommy Marplatt (tmarplatt). PR 927.

**Bugfixes**

* Fixed an issue where greater or lesser than symbols used in text paragraphs which also has
formatting tags would cause the formatting tags to be shifted in HTML output. Issue 929. PR 928.
This fix was backported to 1.5 as patch 1.5.2. A secondary bug was reported in Issue 950, fixed
in PR 951, and backported to 1.5. as patch 1.5.4.

**Documentation**

* Documentation has been updated to reflect changes and new features. PRs 903, and 916.
* The Readme file for internationalisation has been updated and improved. Contributed by Tommy
Marplatt (tmarplatt) PR 917.

**Installation and Packaging**

* The Cantarell font is no longer included in the source and releases. PR 893.
* The way icons are loaded is now simpler and there is no longer a bunch of fallback options. The
icon sets have been reduced to just two complete folders of coloured Typicons: one for dark and
one for light backgrounds. PR 893.
* Fixed a couple of issues in the Windows setup scripts where the user never saw the error message
reporting on missing Python as the window would close before the user would be able to read the
error. PR 903.

**Code Improvements**

* Cleaned up log output, formatting, docstrings, and various other code structure and debug related
parts of the source. PRs 904, 926, 930, and 947.
* Optimised various code snippets, either for performance or readability. The code now makes more
use of Python list comprehension and built-in functions for iterables. PRs 904, and 926.
* Tightened up many of the internal classes, making attributes private, and add setter and getter
functions where that makes sense. PRs 904, 931, and 937.
* The tools for adding and updating translation files have been improved. The Qt-specific `.pro`
file has been dropped, and instead the setup tool will scan the entire source tree each time
language files are updated. TS files can also be specified to the command, or if none are
specified, all files are updated. PR 915.
* The language file update command in the setup tool now uses the pylupdate6 tool from PyQt6, which
has been included directly in the `i18n` folder. This tool uses the newer TS file format, which
the standard PyQt5 tool does not. Related to 911. PR 920.

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Release Notes

This is a bugfix release that fixes an issues with the backup tool crashing the app if the project
path and backup path are on different drive locations. This issue only affects Windows.

Detailed Changelog

**Bugfixes**

* Fixed a bug with using the commonpath command in Python which will raise an error if the two
paths don't have a common root. This is particularly an issue on Windows where the paths can be
on different drives. The command was used in the project backup function, and has now been
replaced by a safer check. Issue 954.

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Release Notes

This is a bugfix release that fixes an issues with rendering HTML from a document, either in the
viewer or the build tool, when there is a greater or lesser than symbol in a text block that isn't
a plain text paragraph, like for instance a comment or a heading. Any such document would fail to
render.

Detailed Changelog

**Bugfixes**

* Fixed a bug where a greater or lesser than symbol would crash the html converter loop if the text
block did not have a format with a 'NoneType is not iterable' error. Most blocks that are not
plain text have the format set to 'None'. Issue 950, PR 951.

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