Release Notes
Based on my own testing and usage, and no serious bugs discovered in quite some time (aside from a few corner case issues), it appears that novelWriter is stable enough for a 1.0 release. Thanks to all the new users who keep providing feedback on bugs, cosmetic issues, or suggesting improvements and new features. I'm glad to hear that others find my application useful, and I will keep making improvements as I get new suggestions and have new ideas myself. At the same time, I will continue to keep novelWriter simple and clean and avoid feature-bloat.
This release mainly fixes cosmetic and other minor issues to the user interface and makes a few minor improvements to some less used features. Aside from this, nothing major has changed since the last release candidate.
This release concludes over two years of tinkering with this project. The project grew out of numerous lunch and coffee discussions with my colleague Marian Lückhof at my former job. We were both looking for a tool for writing novels on Linux that suited our needs. We started assembling a wish list of features that has become novelWriter. In addition, users on GitHub have continued to test new features, provide very helpful feedback, and make new suggestions for improvements. Especially the feedback from @johnblommers has been helpful during much of the initial development time. Over the last months more users have started posting ideas and feedback. Thanks to all of you for your contributions.
The 1.0 release is intended as a first release of the core features of novelWriter. That does not mean that all planned features have been fully implemented. There is a long list of ideas and suggestions to consider and implement. New ideas and suggestions are welcome. Either as feature requests in the issue tracker, or if not fully formed, can be discussed on the [discussions page] (https://github.com/vkbo/novelWriter/discussions).
Detailed Changelog
Bugfixes
- Fixed a minor cosmetic issue with the checkbox next to the "Distraction Free Mode" entry in the menu where its checkmark wouldn't always correspond to the current state of the mode. PR #532.
- When opening the "Writing Stats" dialog in a new project where there is no session log file yet, an error dialog would pop up to complain the file is missing. A missing file is not an error, and should just be quietly ignored. PR #535.
- Don't enforce string data type in meta data lines written to the head of documents. Some of the entries can potentially be of NoneType, and the enforced type will then cause a crash. PR #539.
- Fixed a couple of faulty checks in the index and outline details panel. The checks were not reachable by user actions, but put in place to capture coding errors. PR #549.
User Interface
- The placeholder text in the "Build Novel Project" tool was referring to the name of the build button by a previous label. It now refers to the label that is on the current button. PR #535.
- Add "Move Item Up" and "Move Item Down" to the project tree context menu. These connect to the same function as the same entries in the Tools menu. PR #535.
- Block the Item Editor for the root Trash folder. PR #539.
Other Changes
- The special "Orphaned Files" folder has been dropped. Since the document class saves most of the document meta data to the header of document files, it is no longer strictly necessary and it does complicate the code behind the project tree as the orphaned folder isn't a tracked folder and therefore needs a fair bit of customised code to fit into the rest of the tree data model. Files found in the project's storage folder that do not exist in the project file will now be imported into the main project tree based on a set of fallbacks. All recovered files are prefixed with the word "Recovered". Issue #540, PR #543.
- Changed the way novel headers are added to the Outline view in cases where the strict logic of header levelled isn't obeyed. Previously. a scene header not under a chapter would be added to a previous chapter. That may be a bit confusing. Now, instead, a scene outside a chapter will just be bumped up one level. PR #549.
Documentation
- Fixed some minor typo or wrong word errors in the contributing guidelines. PR #537 by Curtis Gedak @gedakc.
- Fixed minor grammar and typo issues in documentation. PR #544 by Curtis Gedak @gedakc.
- Updated documentation with latest changes and rewritten some sections to make the terminology more consistent. PR #548.
Code Improvements
- Also enforce the maximum line length in text documents. PR #534.
- Updated various parts of the code where a question message box is opened and redirected the call to the main GUI class. This was done mostly for consistency, but the feature was added earlier to ensure that core classes do not depend on Qt libraries. PR #535.