Release Notes
This release contains some new features and a lot of code refactoring. Among the main new features is paragraph alignment and indentation. Regular line breaks within paragraphs are now also supported. The changes are described in more detail below.
Internationalisation
Translation files have been added for Simplified Chinese by Qianzhi Long.
Line Breaks
The way line breaks inside paragraphs work has been changed. A single line break is now treated as a proper line break and will show up in the document viewer and exported documents. A single line break does not start a new paragraph, but forces a break inside the paragraph like a Shift + Enter does in most rich text editors. Two line breaks is still needed to start a new paragraph.
The old syntax of adding two spaces at the end of a line to force a line break within a paragraph will still work as before, so there is no need to change your existing text if you've used this feature. However, there is a new highlighting feature that will show you where in the text you have redundant spaces. If you are used to having double spaces between sentences, you may want to switch off this highlighting feature in Preferences as it will also detect those.
A helper function has been added to the Format menu that can look through a paragraph and remove line breaks in case you've been using line breaks inside your existing text under the assumption that the exporter and viewer will ignore them.
I hope this change will not be too inconvenient. I believe the new behaviour will make more sense for most people. Especially considering some of the feedback I've gotten on how line breaks work. The original implementation was following the Markdown standard, but since novelWriter is not a proper Markdown editor and instead just borrows from Markdown, this behaviour always seemed a bit unnecessary.
Text Alignment and Indentation
The default text alignment is left or justified based on your preferences. For documents with the layout set to Title Page or Partitions, the default is centred. However, sometimes you may want to override this default. A new set of codes have therefore been added to allow specifying alignment as well as additional text margins on individual paragraphs.
The logic of the syntax is as follows:
A single angle bracket will push the text away from the edge it points away from. Therefore, a single > before the paragraph, or a single < after the paragraph, will add indentation on the respective side. It's perfectly valid to do this on both sides at the same time.
A double set of angle brackets will push the text all the way towards the opposite side. Therefore, a double set of >> before the paragraph will indicate right alignment, and a double set of << after the paragraph will force left alignment. Also here both can be used at the same time, which results in the paragraph being centred.
Format menu entries and keyboard shortcuts have been added so that you don't have to memorise these codes.
These Release Notes also include the changes from 1.4 Beta 1 and RC 1.
Detailed Changelog
Internationalisation