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.
Below are the main feature changes of this release.
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 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 aide. 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.
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.