vkbo/novelWriter v1.0.3

Version 1.0.3

on GitHub

Release Notes

This patch release fixes a minor bug sometimes encountered when running novelWriter from command line on Windows. In addition, the Solarized Dark and Solarized Light themes have been added to the selection of GUI and syntax themes by a user contribution.

The main change in this release is to the install scripts and the documentation related to installing and running novelWriter. The primary change is a different method of packaging the app for Windows. Instead of building an .exe file, the new setup instead builds a runnable zip file .pyz. The executable would often be mistakenly flagged by virus control software due to the packaging tools. This is a known problem with pyinstaller and similar tools, but such warnings are always concerning even if they are false positives.

Detailed Changelog

Bug Fixes

• Fix crash when starting novelWriter from command line on Windows from a different mounted drive than where it is installed. This was caused by a relative path lookup that defaulted to the wrong current directory. This works on Linux/macOS which have a common root path, but not on Windows. Issue #581, PR #587.

User Interface

• Added Solarized Dark and Solarized Light GUI and syntax themes. PR #578 by @nullbasis.
• The Typewriter Scroll Mode now works better in combination with the Scroll Past End feature. The scroll mode still only works when there is actually any document to scroll into, but previously it would also not work until the total length of the document reached 40% of the height of the editor window. This was quite confusing. This limit is now reduced to 10%, which means that as long as the Scroll Past End option is enabled, the Typewriter Scroll will always work according to its settings. Issue #589, PR #593.

Installation

• Merged the make.py script into setup.py. PR #584.
• Added a second way to build distributable packages of novelWriter for Windows. The new method does not use any of the current package tools that produce a Windows executable of the app. These packages tend to cause false virus warnings. This new method uses the Python tool zipapp to bundle novelWriter as an executable .pyz file, and adds Python embeddable and library dependencies into the same folder. The folder itself can be distributed as-is, or a Windows installer executable can be generated with setup.py setup-pyz. Issue #580, PR #584.

Documentation

• Updated documentation, main README and Contribution Guide to make them more consistent and to improve installation instructions. Based on issue #586 and input from @mgrhm. PR #592.

Other CHanges

• The HTML generator now adds line breaks after div blocks used to wrap tag/reference lines. This makes the output easier to process by scripts, but has no impact on browser rendering and import into other applications. PR #597.