Version 2.7 Beta 1

[vkbo]

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.

Detailed Changelog

New Features

• The TypIcons icon set has been dropped and all individual icon files removed. Instead, three new icon themes have been added in a total of nine different variations. These icon themes are kept in single files and generated from official sources. They are also colourised at runtime using the GUI theme colours for consistency. Issue Icons with theme colours #2159. PRs Replace icons with Material Symbols #2171, Add Remix Icon and Font Awesome themes #2174, Improve icon colouring after feedback #2177, Fix bug in theme update in outline view #2178 and Theme updates #2203.
• Support for Story Structure comments have been added. These are special in-text comments that can be used for analysing the story structure using various writing techniques. The comments are indexed by novelWriter and can be included in manuscripts as well as exported to CSV files from the Outline View for use with spread sheet software. Idea and documentation by Alan Langford (@instancezero). Issues Add facilities to support story structure analysis and developmental edits #1784, Sub Task: Add parsing and highlighting of story structure comments #2288, Sub Task: Allow exporting story structure to CSV #2289 and Sub Task: Create documentation for the Story Structure feature #2296. PRs Update index data model #2255, Add story structure comment parsing #2284, Export stroy structure #2293, Create story structure docs in project_story.rst #2295 and Add story structure to build settings #2298.

Improvements

• The thickness of the editor cursor can now be set in Preferences. Issue Allow the thickness of the text cursor to be adjusted #2219. PR Reorganise preferences and add cursor width setting #2230.
• The Novel View has been rewritten from scratch using a model/view framework. Several minor issues were resolved in the process. Issues Convert 'Novel Tree' into a model/view set #942 and Novel Tree View selection sometimes does not persist #2253. PR Re-implement Novel View as an item model #2272.
• The logic of where new documents are added in the project tree has been rewritten and improved. The algorithm should now avoid adding chapters within chapters when a scene inside a chapter is selected. Otherwise the behaviour should be similar to before, but it will now also apply the same logic when new documents are created from templates. Issue Logic change to adapt to folder structure #2260. PR Improve placement of new documents #2302.
• Dialogue highlighting should now work a little better for single quoted dialogue when it encounters apostrophes in the same text. Issue Quote highlighting not working as expected. #2271. PR Improve single quote dialogue highlighting #2300.
• Quoted text is no longer highlighted as dialogue in the editor when the document is a project note. This is consistent with how the viewer and manuscript tool work. Issue Project notes should not show dialogue highlighting #2297. PR Fix dialogue highlighting inconsistency #2299.

Documentation

• Internationalisation for the documentation is now properly supported in the code base, and new contributions are possible. Discussion Translation of the user guide #1834. PRs Add internationalisation support for docs #2224 and Update build scripts for i18n docs #2227.

Internationalisation

• French translation files for the documentation were added by @Karduin. PR all .po files translated into French. #2226.

Packaging and Installation

• The move to Qt6 is complete, and the new minimum requirement is Qt 6.4. Issues HighDPI Scaling #864, Move to Qt6 #1142, Update package build for Qt6 for Debian/Ubuntu/Mint #2192, Update package build for Qt6 for AppImage for Linux #2193, Update package build for Qt6 for Windows #2194 and Update package build for Qt6 for MacOS #2195. PRs Switch to Qt6 #2184, Clean up after switching to Qt6 #2187, Fix a few minor issues with the new icon themes, and Qt6 theme support #2190, Update Debian and Ubuntu builds #2191, Clean up utils and update Windows installer #2196, Qt6 theming changes and focus bug fix #2204, Update MacOS build for Qt6 #2301 and Update builds and CI/CD #2306.
• Support for Python 3.9 has been dropped. Due to the Qt6 change, older distros are no longer supported. The oldest Ubuntu release still supported is 24.04. PR Drop Python 3.9 #2182.
• The Windows release now uses a custom novelWriter.exe launcher rather than calling the Python exe directly with novelWriter.pyw as an argument. This means novelWriter can also be launched from its install folder, and desktop shortcuts created directly. It also simplifies the registry entries. PRs Windows exe launcher #2197, Release 2.7 Alpha 2 #2198 and Windows launcher, attempt 2 #2199.
• The Appdata XML files used with AppImage releases has been updated and broken links fixed. PR Update Appdata XML and add screenshot #2229.
• RPM packages are now available for the 2.6.3 release on Fedora 41 and 42. Several minor adjustments to the code base has been made to make the packaging process easier for the 2.7 release. The Fedora releases are maintained by Benson Muite (@bkmgit). Issues Release novelWriter as RPM packages #907, GUI test spelling check failure on Fedora with Hunspell #2276 and Remove FileFormatSpec-1.5 from docs #2303. PRs Remove project format spec docs #2305 and Update package utils and docs #2307.
• The shebang from the launch script on Windows has been removed. Issue Adjust for operation with Python 3.11 under Windows #1284. PR Fix Windows launch script for manual usage #2280.

Code Improvements

• The log output now obeys the NO_COLOR and FORCE_COLOR environment variables. PR Add support for log colour env variables #2228.
• The CI/CD pipeline now runs type checking on the code base using Pyright. PR Add Pyright to syntax checking workflow, and fix errors #2279.
• The CI/CD pipeline now uses Ruff to check code style and format. PRs Update linting tools and configs #2281, Update linting settings #2282 and Add more linting rules #2287.
• The code base has been updated to conform to new linting rules. PR Editor code cleanup, and a few other places #2201.

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This discussion was created from the release Version 2.7 Beta 1.

[xahodo]

Are there any particular places you'd like us to look for bugs?

[vkbo]

Any of the new features really. The Novel View has been rewritten from scratch as well, and novelWriter itself is running on a new major version of the Qt framework, so if you have a High DPI monitor, testing GUI scaling of icons and fonts is useful too.

The new icon themes were added quite a while ago, and I've been using the app myself for months without much issues, so I think that part is working, but I may have missed something there too.

[vkbo]

I've started implementing alternative counting for Chinese too, but for now it's not possible to set in Preferences and only applies to the new Novel View. I'm planning to update the rest for 2.7 RC 1.

If you wish, you can change the usecharcount setting in the conf file from False to True, but yeah, it only works for the Novel View.

[bkmgit]

Great. Pre-release RPM at https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=131831660 will automate production of these later this week. Gnome has a package Yelp that can bring up locally installed documentation files, in particular if the install location follows https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/help-spec/ KDEhelpcenter can bring up locally installed documentation as well, though for fewer file formats.

[instancezero]

Story structure syntax highlighting is fantastic!

Great progress on the export but there's an ordering issue. I edited "Making a Scene" in the example project to this:

### Making a Scene

@pov: Jane
@char: John, Jane
@location: Earth
@mention: Space

%story.time: 0
%story.duration: 5m
%story.pace: slow, informative
%story.incite: Someone installed novelWriter and opened the sample project
%story.complication: Has previously used other software and is disoriented by the interface
%story.turning: Realizes that Markdown syntax is actually very easy to understand and use.
%story.crisis: Fears the reader needs to learn a completely new language, “Markdown”
%story.climax: 
%story.resolution: Axniety about learning a new thing has been addressed.
%story.purpose: Introduce new users to the basics of novelWriter
%story.goal: Demonstrate that it’s worth exploring the next scene

%story.appearance: A nominally clean, sparse apartment in a high rise tower.
%story.touch: 
%story.aural: 
%story.smell: 
%story.clothing: 
%story.prose: friendly although technical
%story.emotions: bewilderment, fear.

A scene is defined by a level three heading, like the one at the top of this page. The scene will be assigned to the chapter preceding it in the project tree. The scene document can be sorted after the chapter document, or as a child of the chapter. Both result in the same output in the end, so it is a matter of preference.

The CSV export has the structure data, but not in the right order (attached ODS file with only that scene, transposed for readability)
_Making a Scene.ods
Screenshot of same spreadsheet.

[vkbo]

Could you create a bug ticket for this?

The keys are sorted alphabetically in the header, but clearly not when writing the values.

[instancezero]

Done. Created issue #2313

[HeyMyian]

There is quite a long (in software time) delay when opening novelWriter on Windows. The Welcome screen is brought up as a white window, and ca. 1-3 seconds later the content of it loads in. This was also present in the 2.7a version but not in older versions. The main app window is visible instantly. What is the Welcome screen doing for so long?

[vkbo]

Without testing (yet) I think it's font related. I have some 1,500 fonts on this system. Windows is probably loading them all as the result of some kind of scan, and the OS probably has them cached, so the second load is quicker.

Coming back to this, I think maybe having a lot of fonts makes the problem worse, yeah. I'm working on a PR to move the issue till before the GUI is initialised. It won't resolve the delay. I don't know if there is a way to do that, but at least it won't freeze in the middle of painting.

[vkbo]

So, I'm testing adding a splash screen while everything prior to the main window is running. This mostly involves loading config, setting up the theme, and icons. It is also when fonts are loaded. I've added the code that checks all the Unicode characters used by novelWriter too, so if there is a delay, it should now happen on the splash screen instead of in the middle of painting the recent projects list.

On Windows 10 with the Verdana font selected, the splash screen freezes for a bit on "Initialising GUI font: Verdana", and then continues. So the delay isn't gone, but it is clearer what it's doing.

I've merged it to main now, so feel free to test it.

[HeyMyian]

Thanks for your work 🙂 The splash screen freezes on the font, no matter which app font is selected. It freezes on all fonts for ~ the same duration as before (1-2 seconds).

[vkbo]

Yeah, it could be loading any font comes with a delay if you have a lot of them. If there was a freeze on the initial load before, you wouldn't have seen it as it happens before the main window is created.

The point now is that it gets all of that done with during the initialisation, so it won't freeze up the GUI later. I think that's the best I can do.

On Linux there are no delays on anything I've tested. I added a 25 ms break on each message just so the splash screen doesn't just flash. I may reduce it further, but a couple hundred ms give or take doesn't matter.

[HeyMyian]

That makes sense, thanks!