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It supports a minimal markdown syntax for formatting text. It is written with Python 3 (3.6+) and Qt 5 (5.3+) for cross-platform support. novelwriter.io GPL-3.0 License 1k stars 45 forks Star Notifications * Code * Issues 26 * Pull requests 3 * Discussions * Actions * Projects 2 * Security * Insights More * Code * Issues * Pull requests * Discussions * Actions * Projects * Security * Insights main Switch branches/tags [ ] Branches Tags Could not load branches Nothing to show {{ refName }} default View all branches Could not load tags Nothing to show {{ refName }} default View all tags 6 branches 65 tags Code Clone HTTPS GitHub CLI [https://github.com/v] Use Git or checkout with SVN using the web URL. [gh repo clone vkbo/n] Work fast with our official CLI. Learn more. * Open with GitHub Desktop * Download ZIP Launching GitHub Desktop If nothing happens, download GitHub Desktop and try again. Go back Launching GitHub Desktop If nothing happens, download GitHub Desktop and try again. Go back Launching Xcode If nothing happens, download Xcode and try again. Go back Launching Visual Studio Code Your codespace will open once ready. There was a problem preparing your codespace, please try again. Latest commit @vkbo vkbo Merge pull request #802 from teymour-aldridge/patch-1 ... a7b4369 Jun 9, 2021 Merge pull request #802 from teymour-aldridge/patch-1 Remove redundant assignment. a7b4369 Git stats * 3,206 commits Files Permalink Failed to load latest commit information. Type Name Latest commit message Commit time .github Some more tweaks to Linux workflow May 6, 2021 docs Bump version to 1.3.2 and update changelog May 30, 2021 i18n Improve feedback and documentation for i18n May 6, 2021 nw Remove redundant assignment. Jun 9, 2021 sample Bump version to 1.3.2 and update changelog May 30, 2021 setup Merge branch 'main' into minimal_setup May 2, 2021 tests Update the handle generator test May 6, 2021 .gitignore Clear handle when tree details panel is cleared May 17, 2021 .readthedocs.yml Added config file for readthedocs Aug 12, 2020 CHANGELOG.md Bump version to 1.3.2 and update changelog May 30, 2021 CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md Create CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md Aug 13, 2020 CONTRIBUTING.md Add branching policy to the contributing guide Feb 8, 2021 LICENSE.md Added license Apr 20, 2019 MANIFEST.in Tweak the project config files Feb 8, 2021 README.md Update readme May 25, 2021 codecov.yml Imports cleanup Sep 26, 2020 novelWriter.pro Fix setup entries for i18n files for minimal packages May 2, 2021 novelWriter.py Add flag to tailor minimal zip package to different OSes Feb 5, 2021 pyproject.toml Tweak the project config files Feb 8, 2021 pytest.ini Tweak the project config files Feb 8, 2021 requirements.txt Pin some dependency versions now that some of the limits are known May 24, 2020 setup.cfg Fix wrong location of parameter in setup.cfg May 5, 2021 setup.py Add entry in xdg-install to remove old desktop icon May 22, 2021 View code novelWriter Implementation Project Contributions Key Features Markdown Flavour Colour Themes Easy Organising of Project Files Project Notes Visualisation of Story Elements Standard Installation Running from Source Dependencies Additional Steps for Linux Additional Steps for macOS Additional Steps for Windows Internationalisation Debugging Licenses Screenshots README.md novelWriter Linux Windows macOS flake8 codecov docs release pypi python [icon-novel] novelWriter is a plain 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. It's designed to be a simple text editor that allows for easy organisation of text and notes, using human readable text files as storage for robustness. The project storage is suitable for version control software, and also well suited for file synchronisation tools. All text is saved as plain text files with a meta data header. The core project structure is stored in a single project XML file. Other meta data is primarily saved as JSON files. The full documentation is available on readthedocs.io. Implementation The application is written in Python 3 (3.6+) using Qt5 and PyQt5 (5.3+). It is developed on Linux, but should in principle work fine on other operating systems as well as long as dependencies are met. It is regularly tested on Debian and Ubuntu Linux, Windows, and macOS. Project Contributions The project isn't taking feature contributions at the moment. If you have an idea, please make a feature request in the issue tracker. Fixes and patches are welcome. So are new translations. Contributions related to packaging and installing novelWriter will also be appreciated. If you want to help translating novelWriter into another language, please see the README in the nw/assets/i18n folder for further details. Before contributing any code, please read the full Contributing Guide . Key Features Some key features of novelWriter are listed below. Consult the documentation for more information. Markdown Flavour Note that novelWriter is not a proper 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 syntax used for its additional features: * A line starting with % is treated as a comment and not rendered on exports unless requested. Comments do not count towards word counts and other statistics. * If the first word of the comment is synopsis:, the comment is indexed and treated as the synopsis for the section of text where it occurs. 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 @. These are used for tagging and inter-linking documents, and can also be included when generating 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. 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-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 novel itself. 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 determine 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 create 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 notes can be added for the story plot, characters, locations, story timeline, etc. These have their separate root folders and are optional to use. Visualisation of Story Elements The different notes can be assigned tags, which other files can refer back to using @-prefixed 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 writing. Standard Installation For a regular installation, it is recommended that you download one of the minimal zip files from the Releases page or the novelwriter.io website. The documentation has detailed install instructions for Linux, Windows, and macOS. They are pretty straightforward. Running from Source If you want to run novelWriter directly from the source code, you must run the novelWriter.py file from command line. 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. Dependencies Dependencies can generally be installed from PyPi with: pip install -r requirements.txt Additional Steps for Linux On Linux, you can most likely find the dependencies in your distribution's repository. On Ubuntu and Debian, run: sudo apt install python3-pyqt5 python3-lxml python3-enchant If you want to set up a launcher and icons on Linux, you can run: python setup.py xdg-install Additional Steps for macOS First, make sure you have properly set up Python3 with Homebrew. If not, check their documentation. In addition, the following steps are necessary to install all dependencies: brew install enchant pip3 install --user -r requirements.txt pip3 install --user pyobjc Additional Steps for Windows Windows does not by default come with Python installed. If you haven't installed it already, get it from python.org/downloads. Remember to select "Add Python to PATH" during the installation. The script windows_install.bat in the setup folder can be used to create desktop and start menu icons for novelWriter. The script will also install dependencies for you from PyPi. Internationalisation If you install from source, you must build the translation files yourself if you want to switch to a different GUI language than British English. This requires that you have the Qt translation framework installed. Check the specific instruction in the README in the i18n source folder for how to build the translation files. Debugging If you need to debug novelWriter, you must run it from the 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. Screenshots novelWriter with default system theme: Screenshot 1 novelWriter with dark theme: Screenshot 2 About novelWriter is an open source plain text editor designed for writing novels. It supports a minimal markdown syntax for formatting text. It is written with Python 3 (3.6+) and Qt 5 (5.3+) for cross-platform support. novelwriter.io Topics python windows macos linux qt5 text-editor synopsis novels meta-data writing-novels novelwriter Resources Readme License GPL-3.0 License Releases 65 Version 1.3.2 Latest May 30, 2021 + 64 releases Sponsor this project * ko_fi ko-fi.com/jadzia626 Contributors 11 * @vkbo * @bkmeneguello * @countjocular * @nullbasis * @jyhelle * @gedakc * @stranger-danger-zamu * @Symbian9 * @mgrhm * @Number042 * @teymour-aldridge Languages * Python 90.0% * HTML 9.6% * Other 0.4% * (c) 2021 GitHub, Inc. * Terms * Privacy * Security * Status * Docs * Contact GitHub * Pricing * API * Training * Blog * About You can't perform that action at this time. You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session. You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.