novelWriter 1.0.2

A markdown-like document editor for writing novels

novelWriter

novelWriter is a Markdown-like text editor designed for writing novels and larger projects of many smaller plain text documents. It uses its own flavour of Markdown that supports a meta data syntax for comments, synopsis, and cross-referencing between files. It's designed to be a simple text editor that allows for easy organisation of text files and notes, built on plain text files for robustness.

The plain text storage is suitable for version control software, and also well suited for file synchronisation tools. The core project structure is stored in a project XML file. Other meta data is primarily saved in JSON files.

The full documentation is available at novelwriter.readthedocs.io.

The contributing guide is available at CONTRIBUTING.

Implementation

The application is written in Python 3 using Qt5 via PyQt5. It is developed on Linux, but it should in principle work fine on other operating systems as well as long as dependencies are met. The unit tests are run on the latest versions of Ubuntu Linux, Windows Server and macOS.

Installing and Running

For install instructions, please check the documentation in the Getting Started section.

TLDR Instructions

Note: You may need to replace python with python3 and pip with pip3 in the instructions below on some systems. You may also want to add the --user flag for pip to install in your user space only.

Install from PyPi

novelWriter is available on pypi.org, and can be installed with:

pip install novelwriter

Dependencies should be installed automatically, but can also be installed directly with: with:

pip install pyqt5 lxml pyenchant

Setup on Linux

If you're running from source, the following commands will set up novelWriter on Linux:

pip install -r requirements.txt
python setup.py install
python setup.py xdg-install

Setup on macOS

If you're running from source, the following commands will set up novelWriter on macOS:

brew install enchant
pip3 install --user -r requirements.txt
pip3 install --user pyobjc

Setup on Windows

For Windows, you can either install via PyPi, or use the Windows installer available from the releases page.

Debugging

If you need to debug novelWriter, you must run it from command line. It takes a few parameters, which can be listed with the switch --help. The --info, --debug or --verbose flags are particularly useful for increasing logging output for debugging.

Key Features

Some features of novelWriter are listed below. Consult the documentation for more information.

Markdown Flavour

novelWriter is not a full-feature Markdown editor. It allows for a minimal set of formatting needed for writing text documents for novels. These are currently limited to:

• Headings level 1 to 4 using the # syntax only.
• Emphasised and strongly emphasised text. These are rendered as italicised and bold text.
• Strikethrough text.
• Hard line breaks using two or more spaces at the end of a line.

That is it. Features not supported in the editor are also not exported when using the export tool.

In addition, novelWriter adds the following, which is otherwise not supported by Markdown:

• A line starting with % is treated as a comment and not rendered on exports unless requested. Comments do not count towards the word count. If the first word of the comment is synopsis:, the comment is indexed and treated as the synopsis for the section of text under the same header. These synopsis comments can be used to build an outline and exported to external documents.
• A set of meta data keyword/values starting with the character @. This is used for tagging and inter-linking documents, and can be used to generate a project outline.
• Non-breaking spaces are supported as long as your system is using at least Qt 5.9. For earlier version, non-breaking spaces are converted to normal spaces when saving the document. This is done by the Qt library.
• Thin spaces are also supported, as well as non-breaking thin spaces, with the same library version restriction as above.
• Tabs can be used in the text, and should be properly aligned. The width of a tab in pixels can be changed in Preferences. Note that for the HTML format, most browsers will treat a tab as a space, so it may not show up like expected. If you import the HTML file to Libre Office, for instance, they should appear as expected.

The core export format of novelWriter is HTML5. You can also export the entire project as a single novelWriter Markdown-flavour document. In addition, other exports to Open Document, PDF, and plain text is offered through the Qt library, although with limitations to formatting.

The HTML format is well suited for file conversion tools and import into other text editors.

Colour Themes

The editor has syntax highlighting for the features it supports, and includes a set of different syntax highlighting themes. The GUI also has an optional dark theme in addition to the default system theme.

New themes can easily be added to the nw/assets/themes folder. Have a look in the existing folders for examples of how to define the colours.

Easy Organising of Project Files

The structure of the project is shown on the left hand side of the main GUI. Project files are organised into root folders, indicating what class of file they are. The most important root folder is the Novel folder, which contains all of the files that makes up the finished novel. Each root folder can have subfolders. Folders have no impact on the final project structure, they are purely tools for organising the files in whatever way the user needs.

The editor supports four levels of headings, which determines what level the following text belongs to. Headings of level one signify a book or partition title. Headings of level two signify the start of a new chapter. Headings of level three signify the start of a new scene. Headings of level four can be used internally in each scene to separate sections.

Each novel file can be assigned a layout format, which shows up as a flag next to the item in the project tree. These are mostly to help the user track what they contain, but they also have some impact on the format of the exported document. See the documentation for further details.

Project Notes

Supporting note files can be added for the story plot, characters, locations, story timeline, etc. These have their separate root folders. These are optional files.

Visualisation of Story Elements

The different notes can be assigned tags, which other files can refer back to using the @ meta keywords. This information can be used to display an outline of the story, showing where each scene connects to the plot, and which characters, etc. occur in them. In addition, the tags themselves are clickable in the document view pane, and control-clickable in the editor. They make it possible to quickly navigate between the documents while editing.

Licenses

This is Open Source software, and novelWriter is licensed under GPLv3. See the GNU General Public License website for more details, or consult the LICENSE file.

Bundled assets have the following licenses:

• The Typicon-based icon themes by Stephen Hutchings are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The icons have been altered in size and colour for use with novelWriter, and some additional icons added. The original icon set is available at stephenhutchings/typicons.font.
• The Cantarell font by Dave Crossland is licensed under OPEN FONT LICENSE Version 1.1. It is available at Google Fonts.
• The Tomorrow syntax themes use colour schemes taken from Chris Kempson's collection of code editor themes, licensed with the MIT License, and the main repo is available at chriskempson/tomorrow-theme.
• Likewise, the Owl syntax themes use colours from Sarah Drasner's code editor themes, licensed with the MIT License, and the main repo is available at sdras/night-owl-vscode-theme.

Screenshot

novelWriter with default system theme:

novelWriter with dark theme: