vkbo/novelWriter v1.6b1

Version 1.6 Beta 1

on GitHub

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 take frequent backups.

Please check the changelog for an overview of changes. The full release notes will be added to the final release.

Detailed Changelog

Features

• When text is selected in the editor, the word counter in the editor's footer bar shows the number of selected words instead of the total document word count. Feature Request #896. PR #899.
• The way page breaks are automatically and manually added has been improved: The Title format no longer has an automatic page break, Partition and Chapter formats now always have a page break, Scene and Section headers can now have page breaks added manually, and empty scene header format will now result in a larger gap between scenes. Feature Request #912. PR #916.
• The Enter, Return and Ctrl+O keyboard shortcuts now open the selected document or item on the tree that has focus. That is, on the Project Tree, Novel Tree, or in the Outline Tab. Previously, these key strokes only affected the Project Tree. Feature Request #913. PR #945.
• The search tool in the document editor now shows the number of search results when the search button is clicked. When the replace tool is used, this number changes if the search result does. Feature Request #645. PRs #946 and #947.

Other Changes

• The icon themes have been merged and reduced to two complete themes, and the Preferences switch for additional dark icons has been removed. The user either selects the Typicons Dark or Light theme. No need to match further settings. PR #893.
• Custom GUI themes and syntax themes can now be loaded from the user's data path. The actual storage path is determined by the OS. Part of Feature Request #892. PR #893.
• A number of text messages and labels on the GUI have been improved. Issue #923. PR #926.
• The switch in Preferences to disbale fixed width text in the editor has been removed. Instead, the user just sets the fixed with setting to 0 to disable it. The settings is now also applied to the document viewer as well. Issue #924. PR #943.
• The Open Document export file produced from the build tool is now more LibreOffice and OpenOffice friendly by using the same default styles as these editors do. Issue #948. PR #949.
• When a document is saved from the document editor, the disk on file is checked for external changes before it is overwritten. Such changes can arise from editing the file from another tool at the same time, from file sync issues, or even from file system issues. If an inconsistency is discovered, the user is asked to confirm the overwrite. Issue #878. PR #890.

Internationalisation

• A couple of missing translations, and typos, have been fixed. PRs #921 and #926.
• Latin American Spanish translation has been added by Tommy Marplatt (@tmarplatt). PR #927.

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue where greater or lesser than symbols used in text paragraphs which also has formatting tags would cause the formatting tags to be shifted in HTML output. Issue #929. PR 928. This fix was backported to 1.5 as patch 1.5.2. A secondary bug was reported in Issue #950, fixed in PR #951, and backported to 1.5. as patch 1.5.4.

Documentation

• Documentation has been updated to reflect changes and new features. PRs #903, and #916.
• The Readme file for internationalisation has been updated and improved. Contributed by Tommy Marplatt (@tmarplatt) PR #917.

Installation and Packaging

• The Cantarell font is no longer included in the source and releases. PR #893.
• The way icons are loaded is now simpler and there is no longer a bunch of fallback options. The icon sets have been reduced to just two complete folders of coloured Typicons: one for dark and one for light backgrounds. PR #893.
• Fixed a couple of issues in the Windows setup scripts where the user never saw the error message reporting on missing Python as the window would close before the user would be able to read the error. PR #903.

Code Improvements

• Cleaned up log output, formatting, docstrings, and various other code structure and debug related parts of the source. PRs #904, #926, #930, and #947.
• Optimised various code snippets, either for performance or readability. The code now makes more use of Python list comprehension and built-in functions for iterables. PRs #904, and #926.
• Tightened up many of the internal classes, making attributes private, and add setter and getter functions where that makes sense. PRs #904, #931, and #937.
• The tools for adding and updating translation files have been improved. The Qt-specific .pro file has been dropped, and instead the setup tool will scan the entire source tree each time language files are updated. TS files can also be specified to the command, or if none are specified, all files are updated. PR #915.
• The language file update command in the setup tool now uses the pylupdate6 tool from PyQt6, which has been included directly in the i18n folder. This tool uses the newer TS file format, which the standard PyQt5 tool does not. Related to #911. PR #920.