novelWriter 1.2.1

A markdown-like document editor for writing novels

novelWriter

novelWriter is a Markdown-like text editor designed for writing novels assembled from many smaller text documents. It uses a minimal formatting syntax inspired by Markdown, and adds 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 files are suitable for version control software, and also well suited for file synchronisation tools. The core project structure is stored in a single project XML file. Other meta data is primarily saved in JSON files.

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

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.

Project Contributions

Contributions to this project are welcome. However, please read the Contributing Guide before submitting larger additions or changes to this project.

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 is a plain text editor that uses Markdown-like syntax to allow for a minimal set of formatting that is useful for the specific task of writing novels. The formatting is currently limited to:

• Headings levels 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 also be included when generate a project outline.
• A variety of thin and non-breaking spaces are supported. Some of them depend on the system running at least Qt 5.9. Earlier versions of Qt will unfortunately strip them out when saving.
• Tabs can be used in the text, and should be properly aligned in both editor and viewer. This can be used to make simple tables and lists. Full Markdown tables and lists are not supported. Note that for HTML exports, most browsers will treat a tab as a space, so it may not show up like expected. Open Document exports should produce the expected result.

The core export formats of novelWriter are Open Document and HTML5. Open Document is an open standard for office type documents that is supported by most office applications. See Open Document > Application Support for more details.

You can also export the entire project as a single novelWriter Markdown-flavour document. These can later be imported again into novelWriter. In addition, printing and export to PDF is offered through the Qt library, although with limitations to formatting.

Colour Themes

The editor has syntax highlighting for the features it supports, and includes a set of different syntax highlighting themes. Optional GUI themes are also available, including dark themes.

Easy Organising of Project Files

The structure of the project is shown on the left hand side of the main window. 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 make up the finished novel. Each root folder can have subfolders. Subfolders have no impact on the final project structure, they are there for you to organise your files in whatever way you want.

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.

Installing and Running

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

TLDR Instructions

If you want to run novelWriter directly from the source code, you must run the novelWriter.py file from command line. For installations on Linux, macOS or Windows, see below.

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:

pip install pyqt5 lxml pyenchant

When installing via pip, novelWriter can be launched from command line with:

novelWriter

Make sure the install location for pip is in your PATH variable. This is not always the case by default.

Setup on Linux

If you're installing 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

This should make novelWriter available as a regular application on your system, with a launceher icon, and file association with novelWriter project files.

Note: If you don't want to install the dependencies from pip and instead use your distro's own packages, you must manually install python3-pyqt5, python3-lxml and python3-enchant (Debian/Ubuntu), or the corresponding packages for your distro.

Setup on macOS

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

brew install enchant
pip3 install --user -r requirements.txt
pip3 install --user pyobjc
python3 setup.py install

At present, novelWriter isn't further integrated into the OS, so you must launch it from command line with:

novelWriter

If you want to help improve the setup process on macOS, it would be much appreciated.

Setup on Windows

For Windows, first ensure that you have Python installed. If not, get it from python.org/downloads. Remember to select "Add Python to PATH" during the installation, otherwise novelWriter will not start.

Then, download the novelWriter-x.y.z-minimal-win.zip file, where x.y.z is the version number, from the releases page. You can extract it to wherever you want to keep novelWriter on your PC, and run the setup_windows.bat file in it (double-clicking it should work). This will install the necessary dependencies from pypi.org and create desktop and start menu icons.

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.

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 Typicons-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: