Release Notes
This is a beta release of the next release version, and is intended for testing purposes. Please be careful when using this version on live writing projects, and make sure you make frequent backups.
Detailed Changelog
Bugfixes
- Fix an inconsistency on the minimum required version of Qt and PyQt between the config files and the code. PR #846.
- Ensure that an item's status setting is parsed after its class when parsing the main project XML. This is just a precaution as the XML writing function always writes the class setting first. PR #852.
- On Windows, the Python icon is shown on the task bar when novelWriter is run directly from code. This has now been fixed by setting a unique application ID. Issue #860. PR #861.
Open Document Exports
- The ODT file writer class has been improved, and the code that writes out paragraphs and header section to the XML has been completely rewritten. The new algorithm is more robust and follows the open document standard more closely. It still diverts from the standard in a few cases, but these are the same points where Open Office and Libre Office diverts. Issue #783. PR #843.
- The previous exporter class would sometimes insert additional line breaks in the generated XML for paragraphs. This does not break with the open document standard, but it was unintentional and trivial to fix. PR #843.
- Some final clean-up was included in PR #859.
Novel Layouts
- All novel layouts, that is "TITLE", "PAGE", "BOOK", "PARTITION", "UNNUMBERED", "CHAPTER" and "SCENE" have been merged into a single layout "DOCUMENT". The "NOTE" layout remains unchanged. The special formatting of level one header on the title page and chapter headers for unnumbered chapters is now handled by a modified header formatting code. Issue #835. PR #837.
- A formatting code for manually inserting page breaks in the text has been added. In the process, similar codes were added to insert vertical spaces in the text. Issue #835. PRs #837 and #848.
- Dropping the layouts also triggered several changes to how project items are now displayed. The difference between document types is now indicated with a combination of icons and item label emphasis. The last column in the project tree also now only shows the item status or importance, not item class and layout. The Item Details panel below the tree has also been updated to show a usage description instead of layout as the last entry. Issue #835. PRs #847, #849 and #852.
Other Features
- A warning will pop up when you launch an alpha version of novelWriter. Since the main branch is now also the development branch, people may run novelWriter directly from source without checking out a release version. Alpha versions are not considered stable. PR #844.
- Two new settings have been added to Preferences. One to control how much information is shown in the last column of the project tree, and one to control whether emphasis is used to indicate which novel documents contain a level one or two header. PRs #847 and #852.
- The label on the first column of the project and novel trees have been renamed to "Project Tree" and "Novel Outline", respectively. PR #852.
- The Help > User Manual (Online) menu entry sends you to the online documentation, and the local documentation is handled by Help > User Manual (PDF), replacing the old Qt Assistant implementation. PRs #856, #859 and #862.
Documentation
- The documentation has been updated and extended to cover the new layout behaviour and to provide information and instruction on how to update the project with the new formats. PRs #850, #851 and #855.
- The technical section of the documentation has been updated, and information on how to run tests has been added. PR #859.
Code Improvements
- The loading and saving of user preferences in the config class has been improved a bit and the code modernised to the current recommended practice for the ConfigParser module. PR #826.
- The index class has been improved. Some data fields that were not being used have been dropped. In addition, a new function has been added that provides a custom indentation scheme for JSON files. The default indentation inserts far too many line breaks. The new function only indents up to a certain level. Indenting the JSON files is useful for people who use version control software on their projects. The limited indentation scheme reduces the number of diff lines as well as reduces the overall file size. PR #840.