Version 2.4 Beta 1

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

Major Features

• A global search feature has been added to the main sidebar. The search panel replaces the project and novel tree when activated. PR #1775. Issue #894.
• A new shortcode to highlight text has been added. PR #1715. Issue #705.
• A new heading format for hard scene breaks has been added. It uses ###! heading markup. The only affect this has in the GUI is that these headings can be independently formatted in the Manuscript tool. PR #1753. Issue #1050.
• The document editor and viewer now have a dropdown menu in the header listing all headings of the current document for quick navigation. The list is capped at 30 entries. PR #1764. issue #1059.

Build Tool Improvements

• The Manuscript Build Tool now has a word stats section below the preview that shows a number of word and character counts for the previewed text. PR #1717. Issues #1114 and #1116.
• The Manuscript Build Tool now shows an outline of the previewed document as a tab next to the build settings list. PR #1768. Issue #1765.
• Tabs handling in HTML output now has a separate setting from the other format. PR #1723.
• Hard line breaks can now be excluded from Markdown builds. PR #1723. Issue #944.
• It is now possible to control the centring and page breaks of partition, chapter and scene headings. PR #1723. Issues #1117 and #1661.
• Special titles (#!) can now be used in notes as well. PR #1723.
• Meta data categories can be filtered out from the manuscript. PR #1723. issue #1132.
• Any heading in a novel document can now be hidden in the manuscript. PR #1759. Issue #1756.
• First line of a paragraph can now be indented in the manuscript. PR #1761. Issue #906.
• Each meta data entry in HTML builds have a new class assigned to it that matches the tag used in the text. PR #1767. Issue #1134.

Other Improvements

• The percentage progress counter in the editor document footer now counts progress per character instead of per line. This is only noticeable on short documents. PR #1725.
• Some improvements have been made to terms on the GUI and some strings have been simplified in order to be easier to understand and to translate. PR #1727. Issue #1726.
• Dates are now formatted according to the selected locale, if such a locale is available. If not, it falls back to the local system locale. PR #1755. Issue #1739.

Code Improvements

• The tokenization of the novelWriter markup format has been refactored and improved. PR #1724.
• A way to read project documents fast has been added. It is useful many places in the code where only the text is needed, not the meta data. PR #1777.