Novelwriter

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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Release Notes

This is a patch release that fixes some minor issues. One issue was with the split tool, which
would drop the last line from the source document during a split if it was missing a final line
break. A minor issue with the display of word counts on the details panel under the project tree
has also been fixed. In addition, the setup script commands for Linux have been improved a bit.

Detailed Changelog

**Bugfixes**

* The details panel under the tree would sometimes show character, word and paragraph counts even
when there was no document selected. This has now been fixed. Issue 781. PR 782.
* The split document tool would drop the last line of the source document. This is generally not a
problem if the last line has a line break after it, but if it doesn't, it is lost in the split.
This was caused by an offset error when calculating the split positions in the file and has been
resolved. Issue 795. PR 796.

**Installation**

* Due to an error in the setup script in the past, a desktop icon was created for novelWriter when
running the `xdg-install` command. This is no longer the case, but the old icon was still left on
some user's desktops. The setup script will now remove that icon if it exists when the
`xdg-install` or `xdg-uninstall` commands are run. PR 784.

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Release Notes

This is a patch release primarily to fix a problem with the Qt translation library used to make
novelWriter available in multiple languages. One of the function calls made to the library was
added recently, in Qt 5.15, which many users on Linux will not have installed on their system. The
issue could be resolved by updating the library, but it's an unnecessary and inconvenient
restriction.

Detailed Changelog

**Bugfixes**

* The code to load translation files for the main GUI was using a function in the QTranslate class
that was added in version 5.15, which means novelWriter could not start on a lower version of the
Qt library if translation files were present. We don't want to force users to use Qt 5.15, so the
call has been removed. Issue 773. PR 774.

**Other Fixes**

* When generating a new project on Windows, the code that generates the new documents in the
project would create duplicate handles, causing a warning to be printed. The warning is harmless
as the collisions are handled. They are caused by the resolution of the clock available to Python
on Windows being in the tens of millisecond range, much slower than the code generates the new
project files. The solution was to append a counter to the timestamp from the clock, ensuring
that the seed is always unique. Issue 769. PR 776.

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Release Notes

This is a pre-release of 1.3. The primary feature of release 1.3 is the addition of
internationalisation (i18n) of novelWriter. The release introduces support for Portuguese, French,
and Norwegian in addition to the default English.

This is a beta release. Use with caution on live project.

Detailed Changelog

**Internationalisation**

* Added support to the source code for internationalisation of the GUI. Thanks to Bruno Meneguello
(bkmeneguello) for doing most of the work. Issue 93. PRs 673, 680 and 684.
* Build Novel Project localisation has been added as well. This is separate from the GUI
localisation as the project may not be written in the same language as the GUI is set to. PRs
676 and 682.
* The text editor's auto-replace features now support inserting spaces automatically when replacing
quotes, as well as in front of major punctuation. These features are common for writing tools
supporting French and Spanish for instance. Issue 703. PR 704.

**User Interface**

* The Preferences dialog has been updated to be more responsive to varying text label lengths due
to different needs for different languages. PRs 687 and 711.
* The Project Settings dialog has been improved to be more consistent and user friendly across the
Status, Importance and Auto-Replace tabs. Issue 691. PR 695.
* The About dialog has been updated to contain more information on contributions. PR 698.

**Translations**

* Portuguese translation added by Bruno Meneguello (bkmeneguello). PRs 673, 681, 686 and 697.
* Norwegian translation added by Veronica Olsen (vkbo). PR 679.
* German translation added (Build tool only) by Marian Lückhof (Number042). PR 683.
* French translation added by Jan Lüdke (jyhelle). PRs 692, 711 and 713.
* American English added by Veronica Olsen (vkbo). PR 693.

**Installation**

* Added i18n support to the setup script. PRs 673 and 729.

**Code Maintenance**

* The ISO lookup dictionary for language codes has been removed and replaced with the lookup
features available in Qt5 through QLocal. The remaining two source files in the constants folder
have been moved up a level as well. PRs 673 and 730.

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Release Notes

This patch fixes a bug where the user's word list (personal dictionary) was not saved properly for
new projects. The added words were thus "forgotten" the next time the project was opened.

In addition, uninstall commands have been added to the main setup script to make it easier to clean
up icons (Linux and Windows) and registry keys (Windows) if the user wishes to uninstall
novelWriter.

Detailed Changelog

**Bugfixes**

* Fixed an issue where the initial file for the user dictionary for a new project would not be
created the first time a word was added to it. This caused the words the user added to the
dictionary to not be loaded the next time the project was opened. Issue 733. PR 734.
* Some of the `setup.py` commands could not run if the PyQt5 packages were missing due to an import
command extracting the version number from the main `nw` package. This was not technically a bug
as the choice to do it this way was made deliberately, but a function has been added to the
`setup.py` script to allow reading the version number without having to import the `nw` package.
PR 749.

**Installation**

* An `xdg-uninstall` option has been added to `setup.py` to uninstall the icons installed into the
system by the `xdg-install` command. PR 736.
* Likewise, a `win-uninstall` option has been added to `setup.py` to uninstall the icons installed
into the system by the `win-install` command. Issue 743 and discussion 739. PR 749.
* Improvements have also been made to the `setup_windows.bat` script, and a complementary
`uninstall_windows.bat` has been added as well. PR 749.

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