# novelWriter Change Log

## Version 1.0 Release Candidate 1 [2020-11-16]

**Installation**

* A new setup option `setup.py xdg-install` will install the desktop integration (icons, mime and launcher) using the OS' `xdg-utils`. This is a more standardised way of installing these elements, and replaces the previous `launcher` option. PR #484.

**Bugfixes**

* The Details Panel below the Outline Tree View was not cleared when a project was closed, and whatever was listed there was still present if a new project was opened. The panel is now reset when a project is closed. Issue #490, PR #491.

**User Interface**

* The Typewriter Mode feature has been improved to keep the cursor stationary at any point in the editor viewport as long as the cursor is at a user-defined minimum distance from the top of the viewport. The mouse, arrow and page keys do not trigger a reposition. The new behaviour is similar to that of the Gutenberg editor in WordPress. PR #482.
* The document editor and viewer are now properly updated when the user switches syntax theme. There is no longer a need to restart novelWriter first to apply the changes. PR #487.
* Some minor GUI changes include: don't run the background word counter when there is no document open, make the split panels of the Build Novel Project tool non-collapsible, and set the initial column widths of tree views to more sensible values. PR #489.
* Block various menu actions, like split and merge documents, project backup, inserts, etc, when there is no project open. None of these being active caused any errors as these actions were all handled by the various tools, but they shouldn't even trigger when there is no project or document to perform the action on. PR #492.
* Clarify the message of the Close Project and Exit novelWriter dialogs. Previously, it may have seemed to some users that clicking "No" would allow the closing to procede without saving changes. This is not true as changes are saved automatically when editing a project. The dialog text should now make this clearer. Issue #494, PR #495.

**Other Changes**

* The index cache file `meta/tagsIndex.json` now has line breaks and indents. This makes it easier to version control if the user really wants to track this file. PR #483.
* The format of the meta data at the top of document files has been changed to be easier to parse, and easier to extend with new settings. It is also more human-readable in cases where the user opens a document file with other software. PR #486.
* Remove the `ToC.json` file and improve the `ToC.txt` file. There latter now has additional information and the format has been improved slightly to be easier to parse if read by an external program or script. PR #493.

**Code Improvements**

* There has been some clean-up of comments and docstrings, as well as optimisation and merging of a few functions that were implemented in multiple places. PR #485.
* Move some of the constants defined in various other classes into the appropriate constants classes, and make all constants upper case variables. PR #489.


## Version 1.0 Beta 5 [2020-10-18]

**Important Notes**

* The minimal supported Python version is now 3.6. While novelWriter has worked fine in the post with versions as low as 3.4, neither 3.4 nor 3.5 is tested. They have also both reached end of life. There are a couple of good reasons to drop support for older versions. PR #470.
  1. Python 3.6 introduces ordered dictionaries as the standard.
  2. The format string decorator (`f""`) was added in 3.6, and is much less clunky in many parts of the code than the full `"".format()` syntax.
  3. Especially 3.4 has limited support for `*var` expansion of iterables. These are used several places in the code.

**Bugfixes**

* Fixed a bug in the Build Novel Project tool where novelWriter would crash when trying to build the preview when running a version of the Qt library lower than 5.14. Issue #471, PR #472.

**User Interface**

* An option has been added in Preferences to hide horizontal or vertical scroll bars on the main GUI. These optons will hide scroll bars on the Project Tree, Document Editor, Document Viewer, Outline Tab and on the controls of the Build Novel Project tool. Scroll bars take up space, and as long as the project doesn't contain very long documents, scrolling with the mouse wheel is enough. The feature is of course entirely optional. PRs #468 and #469.
* It is no possible to enable scrolling past the end of the document with a new option in Preferences. Previously, the editor would just allow scrolling to the bottom of the document. The new option adds a margin to the bottom of the document itself that allows for scrolling past this point. This avoids having to type text at the bottom of the editor window. PRs #468 and #469.
* A new feature called "Typewriter Scrolling" has been added. It basically means that the editor window will try to keep the cursor at a given vertical position and instead scroll the document when the cursor moves to a new line, either by arrow keys or while typing. The position can also be defined in Preferences. The scroll bar uses an animation effect to perform the scrolling to avoid abrupt jumps in the editor window. PRs #468 and #474.
* The line counter in the Document Editor footer now shows the location in the document in terms of percentage. This is convenient for very large documents. PR #474.
* A "Follow Tag" option has been added to the Document Editor context menu. This option appears when right-clicking a tag value on a meta data line. PR #474.
* When applying a format from the format menu to a selection of multiple paragraphs (or lines), only the first paragraph (or line) receives the formatting. The editor doesn't allow markdown formatting to span multiple lines. Issue #451, PR #475.
* The syntax highlighter no longer uses the same colour to highlight strikethrough text as for emphasised text. The colour is intended to stand out, which makes little sense for such text. Instead, the highlighter uses the same colour as for comments. PR #476.

**Other Changes**

* Since support for Python < 3.6 has been dropped, it is now possible to use `f""` formatted strings in many more places in the source code where this is convenient. This has been implemented many places, but the code is still a mix of all three styles of formatting text. PR #478.
* Extensive changes have been made to the build and distribute tools. The `install.py` file has been dropped, and the features in it merged into a new file named `make.py`. The make file can now also build a setup installer for Windows. The `setup.py` file has been rewritten to a more standardised source layout, and all the setup configuration moved to the `setup.cfg` file. PRs #479 and #480.


## Version 1.0 Beta 4 [2020-10-11]

**Bugfixes**

* When the Trash folder didn't exist because nothing had been deleted yet, the lookup function for the Trash folder's handle returned `None`. That meant that any item with a parent handle `None` would be treated as a Trash folder in many parts of the code before the Trash folder was first used. This caused a few decision branches to make non-critical mistakes. In particular the project tree context menu. This issue has now been fixed with a new check function that takes this into account. PRs #452 and #453.
* If an older project was opened, one with a different project file layout than the more recent versions, a dialog asked whether the user wants the project updated or not. However, the function that moves files to their new location would actually start working before the dialog asked for permission. The permission would only be applied to the project XML file. Now, the check is still run before the dialog, but the action of moving files around are postponed to after the permission has been given and the project XML file parsed. PR #453.
* If there were multiple headings in a file, and the last paragraph did not end in a line break, the word counter for the individual sections would miss the last paragraph of the last section due to an indexing error. This has now been fixed. PR #453.
* The last cursor position of a document in the editor would only be saved if the document had been altered. It is now also saved in the cases where the user makes no changes. PR #460.
* When using an aspell dictionary for spell checking, words containing a hyphen would be highlighted as misspelled. This is not the case for hunspell dictionaries. The hyphen is now taken into account when splitting sentences into words for spell check highlighting. PR #462.
* Some of the file dialogs would fail with a non-critical error when the cancel button was clicked. The cancel is now captured consistently in all instances where such a dialog is used, and the calling function exited properly. PR #463.

**User Interface**

* Some minor changes to the text formatting on the Recent Projects dialog. PR #452.
* The Build Novel Project tool has been improved. The settings side panel is now scrollable, and the document and settings panel now have a movable splitter between them. This gives more flexibility to the sizes of the various parts. PR #459.
* A new option to replace tabs with spaces has been added to the Build Novel Project tool. Previously, they were always replaces for HTML output. However, converting them to the HTML code for a tab is actually convenient for later import into for instance Libre Office, which then converts them back to regular tabs. Issue #458, PR #459.
* Non-breaking spaces have been removed from the HTML conversion of keywords and tags. Issue #458, PR #459.
* An upper limit of how large a document the Build Novel Project tool can view has been set. It is 10 megabytes of generated HTML. The tool will still build larger documents, but they aren't displayed. This also limits which options are available in the "Save As" list for such large documents. Only native novelWriter exports are supported in such cases. The limit is an order of magnitude larger than a typical long novel. PR #460.
* The language indicator in the status bar now has a tooltip stating what tool and spell check dictionary provider is being used. PR #462.
* All representations of integers, mostly word counts, are now presented in the same way. They should all use a thousand separator representation defined by the local language settings. PR #464.
* Many parts of the GUI have had a spin/wait cursor added for processes that may take a while and will block the GUI in the meantime. PRs #460, #463 and #464.
* A line counter has been added to the footer of the document editor next to the word counter. It makes it easier to compare the position in the document when also accessing it in an external editor. PR #466.

**Improvements for macOS**

* The native macOS menu bar now pulls the correct menu entries into the first menu column. PR #463.
* The application name in the main menu would state Python instead of novelWriter. As long as the `pyobjc` package is installed, the label will now correctly state novelWriter. PR #463.
* Install and run instructions for macOS have been added to the main README. PR #463.

**Editor Performance**

* The syntax highlighter now remembers what type of line every line in the document is. This means that certain types of lines can be re-highlighted without having to process the entire document again. This is particularly useful for refreshing the highlighting of keywords and tags after the index has been rebuilt. PR #460.
* On a few occasions, the entire document in the editor would be reloaded in order to update the layout and formatting. This is not only slow for big documents, it also resets the undo stack. Instead, the entire document is "marked as dirty" to force the Qt library to update the layout, which is much faster. PR #460.
* For very large documents (in the megabyte range), the repositioning of the cursor when the document was opened would sometimes interfere with the rendering of the document itself. This could potentially cause the editor to hang for up to a couple of minutes. Instead, the repositioning of the cursor is now postponed until the document layout size has reached past the character where the cursor is to be moved. This mode is only used for documents larger than 50 kilobytes. PR #460.
* The document editor will no longer accept single documents larger than 5 megabytes. This restriction has also been applied to the Build Novel Project tool. For reference, a typical long novel is less than 1 megabyte in size. PR #460.

**Other Changes**

* The command line switches `--quiet` and `--logfile=` have been removed. They were intended for testing, but have never been used. The default mode of only printing warnings and errors is quiet enough, and logging to file shouldn't be necessary for a GUI application. PR #453.
* A number of if-statements and conditions in the code that were intended to alter behaviour when running tests, mostly to stop modal dialogs from blocking the main thread, have been removed. These types of changes to the program flow when running tests have now been reduced to a minimum, and modifications instead handled with pytest monkeypatches. PR #453.
* The `QtSvg` package is no longer in use by novelWriter. The internal dependency check has been removed. PR #457.
* It is no longer possible to set the user's home folder as the root directory of a project. The home folder is the default lookup folder in many cases, so it's easy to do by mistake. PR #457.
* The background word counter has been rewritten to run on an application wide thread pool. This is a more appropriate way of running background tasks. PR #462.

**Test Suite**

* Major additions to the test suite, taking the test coverage to 91%. PR #453.
* Test coverage for Linux (Ubuntu) for Python versions 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8 are now separate jobs. In addition, Windows with Python 3.8 and macOS with Python 3.8 is also tested. All OSes are piped into test coverage, and they all have status badges. PRs #453 and #454.


## Version 1.0 Beta 3 [2020-09-20]

**Bugfixes**

* After recent changes, the `Edit Project Item` entry (or shortcut `F2`) in the menu would cause an error. Other means of triggering the edit dialog for a selected item were working fine. The error was caused by a dummy variable being sent by the menu QAction element that was caught by a new optional variable in the dialog function. All other menu actions have been wrapped in lambda functions to prevent this from happening again. PR #448.
* The Merge Tool was permitting a merge on an empty list of files to be merged. This would result in a new, empty file. The Merge Tool will now stop if the list of files is empty. PR #448.
* The orphaned file handling function would cause an error if the orphaned file was empty. This would trigger a secondary issue with uninitialised variables, which has also been fixed. PR #448.
* The context menu on the Project Tree would not show the `New File` and `New Folder` options on root folders if there were no Trash folder present. This weird bug was caused by the filter getting a `None` Trash handle and therefore assuming all root folders were Trash folders as they too have parent handle `None`. PR #452.

**User Interface**

* The Last Opened column in the Open Project dialog now has a fixed width font, and the Words column has a thin space between number and multiplier unit to make it easier to read. PR #452.

**Code Improvements**

* Minor improvemenmts have been made to the core project classes to improve encapsulation and better ensure consistency between the different data structures that store the novel project in memory. PR #447.
* Some unused or redundant code has been removed, and in some places, functions have been merged to reduce code repetition. PR #449.

**Test Suite**

* A lot more tests have been added and test coverage improved. PR #449.


## Version 1.0 Beta 2 [2020-09-13]

**Bugfixes**

* If the horizontal scroll bar appeared at the bottom of the document editor or viewer, for instance if a long, un-wrapable line was entered, the scroll bar would sit on top of the document footer. The footer bar now properly moves out of the way when the horizontal scroll bar appears. Issue #433, PR #434.

**New Features**

* It is now possible to set a different spell check language for a project than the one set in the main Preferences. It is only possible to select a different language, not a different spell check tool. The setting is managed in the first tab of the Project Settings dialog. Issue #368, PR #437.
* The document editor now has the Cut/Copy/Paste options in the main context menu. In addition, Select All, Select Word, and Select Paragraph have been added to the menu. The latter two will select the word or paragraph under the mouse pointer, not the cursor as the main menu entries do. Issue #438, PR #439.
* The document viewer has a new custom context menu with Copy, Select All, Select Word and Select Paragraph with identical functionality and look to the context menu entries in the document editor. PR #439.
* The document view panel now has a back navigation and forward navigation history of 20 documents. The navigation is activated by two buttons in the header, menu entries and keyboard shortcuts in the `View` menu, and by navigation buttons on the mouse. Issue #441, PR #442.
* Clicking on a document in the project tree with the middle mouse button will now open the document in the document viewer. PR #443.
* Added an edit and a search button to the top left corner of the document editor, in the header. The edit button opens the edit item dialog for the open document, and the search button toggles the search box for the document. PR #445.
* Added show/hide comment and synopsis buttons to the bottom right corner of the document viewer, in the footer. These toggle on and off the rendering of these elements in the viewed document. The corresponding settings in Preferences have been removed. PR #445.

**Feature Improvements**

* The document split tool now asks for permission before generating the documents. This adds a final confirmation before generating a lot of new documents that it can be tedious to clean up if the action was activated by mistake. PR #436.
* Both split and merge tools now preserve the document status or importance value from the source item. Previously, it would be reset to the default value. PR #436.

**Test Suite**

* Improved test coverage. PR #446.


## Version 1.0 Beta 1 [2020-08-30]

**Bugfixes**

* Not technically a bug, but the clearing of the document editor footer bar, both during start-up and when a document was closed, would print two ERROR messages to the terminal window. These were benign, but are now prevented from occurring by a slight change in the logic. Issue #418, PR #420.
* Fixed spell check highlighting for words separated by a forward slash, which was treated as a single word. Issue #427, PR #428.

**New Features**

* A new root folder has been added. It is named "Outtakes" by default, and functions as an archive folder for any file that the user wants to take out of the main project tree. The file retains its meta data, is editable, and is always excluded from builds. It is not possible to create files in this folder, but you can create subfolders for organising them. PRs #415, #416 and #419.
* Support an alternative apostrophe. There is a unicode character defined for this, but the regular right hand single quote symbol is the recommended character. However, sometimes this confuses the syntax highlighter. The alternative character bypasses this, and may also be useful for languages that don't use the same type of symbol for these. PRs #429 and #430.

**Feature Improvements**

* The way the enter and tab keys work in the document editor have been improved. If the search or replace text box has focus, the tab key switches between them, and the enter key always triggers the button that is to the right of the box with focus. If the editor has focus, the tab and enter keys work as expected for a text editor. PRs #412 and #413.
* The keyboard sequence `Ctrl+Shift+Z` is now again an alternative to `Ctrl+Y` for the redo functionality. PR #413.
* It is now possible to drag and drop files into the Trash folder. PR #415.
* Files moved to Outtakes or Trash are now cleared from the index, except their word counts. All tags and references are thus out of the project. They are automatically put back in when the file is dragged into the main project tree again. PR #416.
* Tabs and tab stops are now rendered properly in the document viewer. Since the `setHtml` function of the Qt widget used here strips tabs, they were previously just converted to eight spaces. This prevented the tabs from aligning vertically like they do in the editor. The stripping of tabs is now bypassed by replacing them with a placeholder text, and reverting the replacement after the document content has been set. This change also applies to the preview in the Build Novel Project tool, and therefore also the print and print to PDF functions. PR #419.
* The syntax highlighter is now better at detecting what is a single quoted string and what is an apostrophe in a word. PR #430.

**Other Changes**

* A hard maximum project tree folder depth of 30 has been added. Level 28 is the last level where a folder can be created, to allow for one more level of files. There is no particular reason for the number 30, it was mostly a matter of picking a number. 30 is assumed to be excessive. It is hard to navigate a project tree with that many folders. The value was set because many places in the code there was a soft limit of 200. If you created more, various parts of the code would stop working. PRs #416 and #421.
* The dialog for reporting unhandled errors has been changed and a new custom Qt subclass written. It does essentially the same thing as the standard QErrorMessage box did, but adds the feature of a clickable link to the issues tracker on GitHub, and a monospace formatted traceback for the issues ticket. In addition, a crash that pops this dialog will now trigger an attempted controlled shutdown of novelWriter. Before, it would try to keep running, but often leave novelWriter in a half defunct state. PR #417.

**Test Suite**

* Added better test coverage of the Project Load dialog and the Project Outline tool. PR #423.
* Switched from Travis-CI to GitHub actions for running Python tests. PRs #424, #425 and #426.
* All tests can now be run independently of other tests on a function level. Before, this was only possible on a test file level. Issue #431, PR #432.


## Version 0.12.1 [2020-08-16]

**Bugfixes**

* Some of the insert menu functions were broken due to a left-over comma in the insert source code converting the insert text from a string to a tuple. This is a quirk of the Python language and unfortunately not caught as a syntax error. Issue #409, PR #410.

**Feature Improvements**

* The Select Paragraph feature in the Edit menu now selects only the paragraph itself, without the leading line break. This was previously handled entirely by the Qt library, which does this for some reason. Issue #395, PR #405.
* A chapter heading in a file with a different layout than `Unnumbered` can now also be flagged as an unnumbered chapter heading by adding an asterisk to the begfinning of the title text. This only affects the number assignment and counter when running the Build Novel Project tool. The rest of the app ignores the asterisk. Issue #402, PR #406.


## Version 0.12 [2020-08-15]

**User Interface**

* Added a New Project Wizard that can, in addition to create the previous minimal new project, also create a project with pre-defined root folders and chapter and scenes. It is also possible to create a copy of the example project from the source code. Either from the `sample` folder in the source, or from a `sample.zip` file generated by the `setup.py` script and saved to the `nw/assets` folder. PR #366.
* When the user clicked cancel on the colour dialog in Project Settins, the icon would be reset to black. Instead, the colour should remain unchanged. A check that the user actually selected a colour has now been added. Issue #395, PR #403.

**Other Changes**

* Cleaned up code using `flake8` tool and added it as a permanent check on pull requests. The tool filtered out a number of unused variables and imports, which wastes CPU time and memory. Every bit helps. PRs #394, #397 and #401.
* Added contributing guide, code of conduct and issue templates. Direct push to main, and PR #398.


## Version 0.11.1 [2020-08-09]

**Bugfixes**

* The modality of the dialogs have been made more consistent and a few issues with conflicting settings resolved. Mostly the latter relates to some dialogs both having the `exec_()` call and the `show()` call. The former implies modal, the latter does not, and the latter usually took precedence. All dialogs are now modal with the exception of the Writing Statistics and Build Novel Project tools. PR #389.

**User Interface**

* The Help menu entries for the documentation have been improved a bit. If the local copy of the documentations is present (both files are checked now), and the Qt Assistant is installed, the "Documentation (Local)" entry is visible with `F1` as keyboard shortcut. The "Documentation (Online)" is always visible with `Shift+F1` keyboard shortcut. The `F1` key redirects to this too if the local copy isn't available. PR #386.
* The Writing Statistics tool now has the ability to set a cap between 100 and 100 000 words on the word count histogram bars. This is useful if the user has added a large chunk of text, in which case the histogram bar is dominated by this one entry. Now, anything on and above the cap value will have a full bar, and all other entries scale from 0 to the cap value. PR #387.

**Documentation**

* The main index page of the documentation now has a build date on it. PR #390.

**Other Changes**

* The Travis CI build system has been altered to first check that the tests pass for Python 3.8, for then to move to the other supported Python versions. These are currently 3.6 and 3.7. Python 3.9 will be added when it is released in October. PR #388.
* Some clean-up of the source code, mostly in terms of unused imports and missing docstrings. PR #391.


## Version 0.11 [2020-08-08]

Note: The source code has now switched to a default branch named `main` ahead of the changes planned by GitHub.
See their [notes](https://github.com/github/renaming) for more information.

**Bugfixes**

* The `pytest` config file now sets the local source path as the first search path for the main novelWriter package. This ensures that the tests can always find the correct version of the code when running tests. PR #381.
* The `install.py` script was expecting an older file layout for assets files. This has now been updated to the curren file layout. PR #380.

**User Interface**

* A set  of new exception handling functions have been added. Recoverable errors will now pop an error dialog with the error message and a traceback for the user. The application will not generally exit on such errors, unless it causes Python itself to abort. It is possible to copy and paste the error message so it can be used for a ticket in the issue tracker. PRs #376 and #378.

**Documentation**

* The full documentation for novelWriter, available at [novelwriter.readthedocs.io](https://novelwriter.readthedocs.io/) has been rewritten. It was drifting out of sync with the development of the code. In addition, many improvements have been made to the reStructuredText formatting of the documentation source by providing better cross-reference linking and highlightings. The main repository README file has been updated to match. PRs #375, #382, and #384.
* The main `setup.py` script has been updated to also build documentation for the Qt Assistant when given a `qthelp` flag. The compiled help files are copied into the `nw/assets/help` folder, and bundled with the source when pushed to PyPi. The GUI has been altered to open the local help files instead of redirecting to the online documentation if the local files are both present and the Qt Assistant is installed. PR #375 and #379.

**Other Changes**

* Some minor changes to the source code has been made to more correctly use the Python `__package__` variable. PR #376.


## Version 0.10.2 [2020-07-29]

**Bugfixes**

* Fixed a crash when using the replace part of search/replace when using regular expressions for the search. The replace code assumed the search field was a string, which isn't the case when using RegEx, rather itb is a QRegularExpression or QRegExp object. This has now been resolved. In addition, the replace feature has been improved to make sure that it only replaces text selected by an actual search, not any user selected text. Issue #371, PRs #372 and #373.
* The Tokenizer class used for converting novelWriter markdown to other formats produced some invalid escape sequence warnings. The warnings did not seem to affect the results, but have nevertheless been fixed. PR #370.

**Features**

* Insert menu entries to insert single and double open and close quote symbols have been added. These are the symbols selected as the quote symbols in Preferences. They also have keyboard shortcuts associated with them. PR #367.


## Version 0.10.1 [2020-07-11]

**Bugfixes**

* Any error encountered when converting a project from the old project folder structure to the new were not properly propagated to the origin of the call. Any errors of warnings occurring in the process would previously not have been reported properly. These are no reported in a pop-up dialog. PR #359.

**User Interface**

* The tooltip of the search/replace Regular Expression option has been updated to state the feature only works for Qt 5.3 or higher. PR #359.
* The menus have been restructured a bit. The search options have been moved to a new Search menu. The menu order has been changed to a more standard order. The Build Novel Project tool moved to the Tools menu. The full screen distraction free mode is now named Focus Mode everywhere in the GUI, source code and settings files. Previously, different names were used in different places. PR #361.
* Tooltips have been added to main GUI buttons without a button text. PRs #361 and #363.

**Features**

* The search/replace Regular Expression option now uses the newest QRegularExpression tool instead of the older QRegExp tool if the Qt version is 5.13 or above. Otherwise, it still uses the old. The main benefit of the newer tool in this context is better Unicode support. PR #360.
* The Build Novel Project tool can now generate Roman numbers for chapter markers. Both upper and lower case is supported. PRs #362 and #363.

**Other Changes**

* The install scripts now try to create folders before copying icons. PR #364.
* The manifest file now lists the root assets folder, so that it is included in the pypi build. PR #364.
* The .desktop template file has the correct categories set according to the FreeDesktop standard. PR #364.


## Version 0.10.0 [2020-06-30]

**Note:** If the project file is opened by this version of novelWriter, the project file can no longer be read by an earlier version due to the change of how autoReplace settings are stored.

**User Interface**

* The Session Log dialog, now named Writing Statistics, has been redesigned and now has a few more filter options. This update also fixes the filtered time count properly. The dialog now shows a histogram of words added in a given session, or optionally, on a given date. The filtered log data can also be saved as a JSON or CSV file, the latter suitable for importing to a spread sheet. The new dialog tool required a new session log file format, so the new session log has been given a new file name. The old log file will be left untouched in the project's `meta` folder. For projects created prior to this change, the log will record a word count offset that will be subtracted from the first entry such that the first word diff will always be 1 instead of the total word count of the entire project. Such a large word diff would otherwise saturate the histogram. PRs #339 and #349.
* The document editor panel has received a footer bar like the one recently added to the document view panel. The footer bar currently shows the status level of the document, and the document word count. In addition, the word counter shows the change in count for the current session in the same way project word count and change is shown in the status bar. The document word count has been removed from the main window status bar. PR #348.
* The document editor footer can optionally be hidden in Distraction Free mode. PR #351.
* The Italic and Bold menu entries have been renamed to Emphasis and Strong Emphasis, which is more in line with what they represent in Markdown and HTML. They are still renderred as Italic and Bold in the document viewer, but the HTML export is using the `<em>` and `<strong>` tags. PR #350.
* Due to several issues with the formatting of emphasised text using `*`, `**`, and `***` wrappers, especially when using nested emphasis, the syntax for emphasis (italic) and strong (bold) has been reverted to use `_` and `**` wrapping, respectively. This removes the ambiguity, and resolves the corner cases. It was possible to resolve the issues by using a custom written parser that takes care of all valid combinations, but such a parser would be a bit too slow for use in syntax highlighting. I decided therefore to stick with RegEx parsing, and keeping those RegExes as short and fast as possible while enforcing the basic formatting rules. Separating the notation for emphasis and strong is commonly recommended when writing Markdown anyway, so it is a sensible compromise between speed and flexibility. This PR partially reverses PR #310. Issue #353, PR #355.
* The syntax highlighter now properly highlights overlapping formattings, including emphasised text inside of highlighted quotes. PR #355.
* The colour highlighting of emphasis, strong and strikethrough, can now be switch off in Preferences. The syntax highlighter will still apply the italic, bold and strike effects. PR #357.
* The project path in the Details tab of Project Settings can now be selected and copied to clipboard. Issue #354, PR #356.

**Other Changes**

* The way the auto-replace settings are stored in the project XML file has been changed in order to be more consistent with other features, and to avoid a potential pitfall in defining the tag name from a user-entered string. The project class retains its ability to read the old format of the file, and will save in the new format. The file format of the project XML file has been bumped to 1.2. PRs #344, #346 and #347.


## Version 0.9.2 [2020-06-26]

**Bugfixes**

* The project tree word counts were getting mixed up when a file was moved to the trash folder, or permanently deleted. This has now been fixed, and moving a file should give a zero net change of project word count. Permanently deleting it will result in a negative net change. Issue #333, PR #335.

**User Interface**

* There is a feature in the project tree class that ensures that the tree item being acted on is visible in the tree. It is called when you for instance click the header of an open document. It was also activated when opening a document from the tree view with either double-click by mouse, or by using the Enter key. This meant that the tree view would often move, which made it hard to mouse click on items after eachother since you ended up chasing a moving target. This feature is now disabled for document open. In addition, the scroll into view feature has been added to the search/replace call to move into the next document when reaching the end of the current document. This was requested in Issue #332. PR #334.
* The Build Novel Project tool will now display the build time of the document in the preview window in order for the user to know if it is potentially out of date. The timestamp is given, as well as a fuzzy time string, indicating the age of the content. Issue #331, PRs #336 and #337.

**Documentation**

* The documentation has been updated to clarify the correct formatting for italic, bold and strikethrough formatting tags. Issue #220, PR #338.


## Version 0.9.1 [2020-06-21]

**Bugfixes**

* Fixed a serious bug in the replace part of the search/replace function that caused novelWriter to crash when the replace text function was called. Issue #327, PR #328.


## Version 0.9 [2020-06-21]

**Core Functionality**

* Underline text formatting has been removed. It is not standard HTML5, nor Markdown, and was previously implemented using the double underscore notation that in standard Markdown is renderred as bold text. Instead, novelWriter now renders a single `*` or `_` wrapping a piece of text *within* a paragraphs as italicised text, and a double `**` or `__` as bold text. The keyboard shortcuts and automatic features *only* support the `*` notation. A triple set of `***` are treated as both bold and italicised. PR #310.
* Strikethrough formatting has been added back into novelWriter using the standard Markdown `~~` wrapping. PR #310.
* Added support for thin spaces and non-breaking thin spaces. PR #319.
* The `Ctrl+Z` key sequence (undo) would not go through the wrapper function for document action for the document editor, but act directly on the document. This caused some of the logic preventing conflict between auto-replace and undo to be bypassed. This has now been resolved by blocking the keypress itself and let the menu action handle the key sequence. Issue #320, PR #321.
* The dialog window size and column width setting for the auto-replace feature in Project Settings are now preserved between closing and opening the dialog. Issue #322, PR #324.

**User Interface**

* The Open Project dialog will now ask before removing an entry from the recent projects list. PR #309.
* The text emphasis functions, either selected from the menu or via keyboard shortcuts, will now try to respond to the command in a more meaningful way. That is, the text editor will try to toggle the bold or italics features independently of eachother on the selected text. A menu entry to apply both at the same time has also been added. PR #310.
* The document editor search tool has been completely rewritten. It now appears as a search box at the top of the document, and has a number of toggle switches added to it. You can modify the search tool to be case sensitive, select only whole words, use regular expression search strings, loop when reaching the end, and continue the search in the next file in the project tree. For the replace feature, you can also select to have the feature try to preserve the case of the replaced word. Issues #84 and #305, PR #314.
* A dialog has been added for selecting quotation mark style. These are now used in the Preferences dialog instead of a plain text edit box. PR #317.
* Added an insert menu for inserting special symbols like dashes, ellipsis, thin and non-breaking spaces, and hard line breaks. PR #319.
* A menu option to replace straight single and double quotes in a selected piece of text has been added. This uses the same logic as the auto-replace feature. Issue #312, PR #321.
* When pressing `Ctrl+R` while the document editor has focus, the edited document will be viewed or refreshed in the document viewer. Previously, the selected document in the project tree had priority. The document is also now saved before loaded in the viewer, ensuring that it shows the very latest changes. Issue #143, PR #323.
* The selection in the project tree should not scroll into view when just opening the document. This can be quite annoying if loading several documents in sequence by double-clicking as the target may move just when you're about to click. PR #325.

**Other Changes**

* Added the file's class and layout to the meta data string of saved document files. This meta data is only used to restore the file meta information into the project if it was lost from the project file. It is also useful information when reading the file in external tools. PR #308.


## Version 0.8 [2020-06-14]

**Bugfixes**

* The HTML converter, used for the document view window as well as the Build Novel Project tool, would crash novelWriter if a file included an `@tag:` entry with no actual tag name following it. In addition to fixing this issue, the call to the converter is now also wrapped in a `try/except` construct to prevent crashes caused by potential edge cases in document content. If the rendering fails, the view window will show an error message instead of the intended document. Issue #298, PR #299.
* Clipping of the descended part of fonts in the document title bar has been fixed. Issue #295, PR #300.
* When clicking a tag in the editor while the viewer was closed, nothing would happen. Now, the viewer is first opened before navigating to the source of the reference tag. Issue #294, PR #306.
* The missing optional rendering of synopsis comments in the document view panel has been added. Mentioned in Issue #301, PR #311.

**User Interface**

* A details panel below the Outline tree view has been added. The panel shows all the information of a selected row in the tree view above, including hidden columns, and some additional information. The tags and references also become clickable links that when clicked will open in the document viewer. PR #281.
* Icons have been added to the Title and Document columns in the Outline. The titles get a new icon indicating the header level, while the documents get the already existing document icon. PR #302.
* Added a context menu to the project tree for easier access to some of the most use actions on the tree. PR #282.
* Improved the support for High DPI screens. Margins and box sizes that were hardcoded should now scale. User settings should also scale back and forth when switching between scale factors. Issue #280, PR #285.
* The total edit time of a project is now displayed on the Details tab of the Project Settings dialog. PR #290.
* The title bar in the document editor now has a full screen button and a close button, and in the document viewer a reload button and a close button. The full screen button toggles the distraction free mode, and the reload button regenerates the document being viewed to update any changes that may have been made to it. PRs #293, #300, #303 and #306.
* The References panel below the document viewer has been redesigned. It now sits in a resizeable panel below the document, and its controls sit in a footer bar in the document itself. The functionality of the feature is otherwise unchanged, but the buttons have received new icons. PRs #304 and #306.
* The option to render comments and synopsis in the document view panel has been added to Preferences. The toggle option for comments that was previously in the menu has been removed. PR #311.

**Project Structure**

* The way GUI states of switches, column widths, etc., is saved has been improved a bit during the High DPI updates. PRs #285 and #286.
* Some settings have been moved around to more appropriate sections in the project XML file. The project load function still reads the values from the previous location if opening an older project file. PR #288.
* A file opened in the Trash folder is no longer "Read Only". The feature was rather arbitrary, and also required a GUI element to notify the user of the fact. Any file can now be edited. PR #292.

**Code Structure**

* The core classes making up the project itself were previously merged into a single source code file. This file was getting a bit big, so they have been split up again. PR #289.
* A lot of Inkscape meta data has been removed from the SVG icons, reducing the file sizes quite a bit. PR #291.
* Opening and closing of files are now properly handled also when using the ConfigParser tool. Previously, files were not properly closed after the content had been read, leaving the handles open until the Python garbage collector handled them. PR #300.


## Version 0.7.1 [2020-06-06]

**Bugfixes**

* For some fonts (especially Ubuntu) the minimum column width in the tree widgets would be estimated to be too large. It especially meant that the "include when exporting" flag had a column much wider than it needed to be. This setting is now overridden with the known size of the icon, plus a 6 pixel margin. PR #278.
* Correctly fixes issue #273, which was actually due to an old css setting from early development. PR #287.

**User Interface**

* The Build Novel Project tool now has an option to not style the text before printing or exporting to file. PR #276.
* When opening an item in the project tree, the focus remains on the tree and no longer switches to the editor. It makes it easier to flip through files and look at them by pressing enter repeatedly. PRs #278 and #287.
* Added a title icon and document icon to the outline view. PR #278.
* The timeline class root folder now has a calendar icon instead of a clock. PR #287.
* Regrouped the options on the Build Novel Project tool a bit. They are now sorted into Titles, Format, Text and File categories, with more consistent labelling. PR #278.
* A link colour has been added to the Build Novel Project tool. It's the same colour as the header. PR #287.

**Other Changes**

* Reduced the number of files and folders in the source code a bit. PR #277.


## Version 0.7 [2020-06-01]

**Bugfixes**

* Fixed a bug where novelWriter might crash if a file is deleted immediately after being created, and also additional points-of-failure if the project was new. PR #267.

**User Interface**

* The back-references list in the project view panel now shows references to any tag in the open document, not just the first tag. Issue #227, PR #234.
* Clicking a tag now tries to scroll to the header where the tag is set. The index needed a couple of minor changes for this feature, so this will invalidate the old index for a project saved with an older version, and require a new to be built. This is done automatically. PR #234.
* Moved the Close button on the "Build Novel Project" dialog to the area with the other buttons since we anyway increased the size of that area. PR #256.
* Updated the unit for Preferences > Editor > Big document limit from `kb` to `kB`. Issue #258, PR #260.
* Added Typicons-based coloured icon set also for light GUI background. PR #265.
* The export check mark that was added to the Flags column in the project tree in Version 0.6 has been moved to its own column, and been replaced with a proper icon. The details panel below it has been updated as well. PR #268.
* Icon sizes are now calculated based on the size of the text, and all text and icons should scale relative to the default GUI font size. PR #268.
* The font family and size of the main GUI font can now be changed in Preferences. For Windows, this defaults to Cantarell 11pt, which is now shipped with novelWriter. On other systems it defaults to the system font. Special accommodations had be made for Ubuntu where the font size of the tree widget was not updated automatically (Issue #273). PRs #269, #270, #274 and #275.
* There are no Monospace fonts on the main GUI any more. Where fixed width is needed, the size is calculated beforehand with Qt's font metrics class. PR #271.
* Fonts are now selected via the system's font dialog rather than the font combo box. PR #270.
* Word, character and paragraph counts are now updated on the project tree details panel if the file currently being edited is also selected in the tree. PR #272.
* The Build Novel Project dialog now shows the previous generated content when it's opened. PR #272.
* The Build Novel Project tool can now export the HTML and NWD output into a JSON data file. This file is convenient if the user wants to post-process the output with for instance Python, or one of the other numerous languages that can read JSON files. PR #272.

**Project Structure**

* The project folder structure has been simplified and cleaned up. We also now freeze the main entry values in the main XML file. The XML file is now given version 1.1, and no further core changes to its structure will be made without bumping this version. We're also locking it to only be opened by version 0.7 or later. An old project file is converted on first open. PRs #253 and #261.
* When a project is closed, two table of contents files are written to the project folder. They are named `ToC.txt` and `ToC.json` and are there for the user's convenience if they want to find a specific file from the project in the data folders. As discussed in Issue #259, PRs #261 and #262.
* The expanded node flag from the project tree was also saved for file entries, which cannot actually be expanded. These flags are no longer saved in the XML file. PR #261.

**Other Changes**

* Dropped the usage of `.bak` copies of document files. This was the old method to ensure the document data was written successfully, but it uses twice the storage space. Instead, writing via a temp file is the current safe way to save files. PR #248.
* The project class now records the accumulated time in seconds a project has been opened. This data is not yet displayed anywhere, but it is being tracked in the project XML file. PR #261.

**Test Suite**

* Added tests for Build Novel Project, Merge Folder and Split Document tools. PRs #263 and #264.


## Version 0.6.3 [2020-05-28]

**Bugfixes**

* It was possible to have the backup folder set to the same folder as the project, resulting in an infinite loop when `make_archive` was building the zip file. This crash of paths is now checked for before moving to the archive step. Issue #240, PR #241.
* Fixed an issue with the Build Novel Project tool on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS where the dialog wouldn't open. Issue #243, PR #246.

**User Interface**

* Renamed the "Generate Preview" button on the "Build Novel Project" tool to "Build Novel Project". You must actually click this to be able to export or print. Issue #237, PR #238.
* Added font family and font size selectors to the "Build Novel Project" tool. You may want a different print font than used in the editor itself. Issue #230, PR #238.
* Removed the "Help" feature in "Build Novel Project" and instead added detailed tooltips. Issue #250, PR #249.
* Changed the title formatting codes for "Build Novel Project" to something less verbose. The old codes are translated automatically. Issue #247, PR #249.
* A margin of the viewport (outside the document) has been added to the document editor and viewer to make room for the document title bar. Previously, the title bar would sit on top of the document's top margin, which would sometimes hide text that would otherwise be visible (when scrolling). PR #236.
* Fixed an alignment issue for the status icon on the project tree details panel. Mentioned in #235, PR #239.
* Removed the `Xo` icon for NO_LAYOUT in the project tree details panel. Mentioned in #235, PR #239.
* Added a "Details" tab to the "Project Settings" dialog, which also lists the project path. Issue #242, PR #239.


## Version 0.6.2 [2020-05-28]

* Botched release. Replaced with 0.6.3. Crashes when Build Novel Project is opened.


## Version 0.6.1 [2020-05-25]

**Bugfixes**

* The Outline view now takes into consideration the exported flag, and does not show excluded files in the outline. PR #224.
* Page layout format was ignored when exporting project. The formatting of this layout has now been added. PR #224.
* If multiple headings were present in a file, the sorting of headings in the Outline view would follow a text sort not a numerical sort of the line numbers. That is, it would be sorted as "1", "10", "2", "20", etc. This has been fixed. PR #226.
* The text justification in the preview in the  Build Novel Project was following the main Preferences settings, not the Build settings. This did not affect the formatting of the exported file itself, but the preview is now made consistent with the build settings. Issue #228, PR #231.

**User Interface**

* Recent projects in the open project dialog can be removed from the list by hitting the delete key. PR #225.
* Moved the browse button to after the path box in the open project dialog. PR #225.

**Other Changes**

* The three remaining dependencies now have a minimum version set. PR #224.
* Moved the sample project up one folder level. PR #224.

**Documentation**

* The export page in the documentation erroneously stated that line breaks could be added to titles by adding `%\\%`. The correct syntax is `\\`. Issue #229, PR #231.


## Version 0.6 [2020-05-24]

**Bugfixes**

* Fixed a bug in validation of `@tag:` meta tags where one or more spaces before the `:` would still pass as a valid tag, but the keyword index array would be missing those spaces in its counter. This mainly affected the highlighting of keywords, which would be misaligned. PR #206.

**User Interface**

* The Export Tool has been removed and replaced by a new tool called "Build Novel Project". The new tool has the same filtering options as the Export Tool, but with more formatting options for titles. It also has a preview window to display the generated document. A Save As button provides exports to HTML, novelWriter Markdown, plain text, PDF and Open Document format. LaTeX export has not been ported over, and interfacing with Pandoc is no longer supported either. Although, as before, the HTML export can be converted with Pandoc to other formats outside of novelWriter. The new tool also supports printing. PRs #204, #220 and #221.
* The Project Settings, Preferences, Item Editor, Merge Documents, and Split Documents dialogs have been redesigned. The ones with tabs now have vertical tabs on the left with horizontal labels. The dialog design should be more compact, and have room for more tabs for future settings. PR #212.
* A new icon, as well as a mimetype icon for the project files, have been designed and added to the app. PRs #213 and #214.
* The About dialog has been completely redesigned to allow more information. PR #217.
* The Open Project dialog has been cleaned up and made more readable. The project paths have been moved out of the list, and are now displayed when an item is selected instead. Icons have been added, and the New project dialog can also be triggered from this dialog. PR #218.
* The document stats have been added to the details panel below the project tree. PR #219.


## Version 0.5.2 [2020-05-21]

**Bugfixes**

* When running on Windows 10, some of the buttons were missing icons. More fallback icons have been added to ensure that all current buttons have a fallback path that always ends in an icon. PR #211.

**User Interface**

* The statusbar has been redesigned a bit. The block icons showing document and project saved status have been replaced by LED icons. The statistics has been moved to a separate label, and most of the detailed stats moved to its tooltip. PR #210.
* Default icon theme is now `Typicons Grey Light`. PR #211.
* Clicking on the document header selects the document in the project tree, but this functionality has been enhanced to also ensure the document is expanded and visible in the tree. If it's scrolled out of view, the tree will scroll it into view. PR #215.
* Syntax highlighting of text in quotes can now be turned off in Preferences. PR #215.

**Core Functionality**

* Checking for version dependencies and a few packages (aside from PyQt5) is now done later in the start-up so that it is possible to alert the user with a dialog box instead of terminal error messages. PR #210.
* Made a few minor changes to the code so novelWriter can run with Python 3.4.3 and Qt 5.2.1, that is, it runs on last version of Ubuntu 14.04. This level of compatibility is not guaranteed to remain in the future, but for now, the changes have no impact on functionality. PR #210.


## Version 0.5.1 [2020-05-14]

**Bugfixes**

* Fixed a bug where only some of the text would be rendered in the editor window when a large text document was loaded. The text is there in the buffer, but the rendering process was interrupted by the function that recalculates margins. This recalculation was added with the document tiles in 0.5. The re-rendering of the text could be triggered by opening the search bar, indicating that it was caused by the shifting of the vertical document frame. PR #208.

**User Interface**

* The icon theme functionality of novelWriter has been reworked. For the default system theme, very little has changed. It should still load whatever the system provides, but this doesn't work for all icons on Windows 10 for instance. It is now possible to select between three icon themes in the Preferences dialog, independent of the GUI theme. Using a theme breaks the dependency on the operating system to provide standard icons. Qt provides some, but not all needed by novelWriter. PR #207.
* Added a check that warns if the project file was saved with a newer version of novelWriter as that may cause meta information to be lost. This warning will remain there until the file format is finalised. This is an issue with preserving certain settings, not the project structure itself. PR #205

**Debugging**

* Reduced the number of command line switches needed for debug runs. PR #205.


## Version 0.5 [2020-05-09]

This release of novelWriter has a number of feature updates, bringing it one step closer to initial feature completeness for a version 1.0 release.

In the pipeline for 1.0 is a completely new export tool with improved and added options, including printing. Further improvements are also planned for the new Outline View added in this version. When these additions are completed, novelWriter will start moving towards a 1.0 release via release candidates. I'm hoping to wrap up this year and a half long stage of initial development soon so that I can spend more time using it than creating it.

**Additional thanks** to @countjocular for PRs #173 and #174, and to @johnblommers for all the helpful feedback and issue reports for the new features added in this, and previous releases.

### Noteable Changes

* The Timeline View dialog is now gone. Instead, the main window area has been split into two tabs. The first, the "Editor", contains the Document Editor and Viewer panels. The second, the "Outline", contains a new Outline View of the novel part of the project, broken down into a tree view of all the project headings. All meta data associated with each part of the novel can be viewed in further columns, selectable from a drop down menu by right-clicking the header. These columns can also be rearranged.
* Both the Editor and Viewer panels now have a header showing the document label as seen in the Project Tree. Optionally, the full path of the document can be viewed. Clicking this header will select the document in the Project Tree, making it easier to find where the document belongs in the structure.
* A project load dialog has been added when novelWriter is launched. It will show you your recently opened projects, let you browse for those that aren't listed, or create a new project. More features will be added to this dialog later on.
* The Preferences dialog has been completely redesigned to make it easier to find the various settings and understand what they do.

### Detailed Changelog

**Features**

* An Outline View panel has been added to the main GUI window. The Outline View can show all meta data associated with a novel heading in a column-wise manner. The Timeline View feature has been dropped in favour of the new Outline View. PRs #140, #181 and #191.
* A synopsis feature has been added. It allows a comment to be flagged as a synopsis comment to be picked up by the indexer and displayed in the GUI. Currently available in the Outline View. PRs #140 and #191.
* A document title bar has been added to the top of the editor and viewer. These show the document label as seen in the project tree. Optionally, the full document path can be shown. Clicking the title will highlight the document in the project tree. PRs #192 and #194.

**User Interface**

* A Project Load dialog has been added, which pops up when novelWriter is launched. It allows for opening other recent projects, browse for projects, or start a new project. This replaces the former Open and New Project features, as well as the Recent Projects menu entry. PRs #177 and #183.
* The command line switches for debugging have been changed a bit. Higher level of debugging now includes the lower levels, preventing the need for specifying for instance both debug and verbose debug. PR #182.
* The Preference dialog has been completely redesigned. The options are now displayed vertically, in four tabs instead of two, and with more informative text explaining what they do. Some previously unconnected options have also been added. PR #193.

**Bug Fixes**

* The `install.py` script has been fixed to reflect changes in storage location of the themes. PR #174.
* Fixed a bug with launching Preferences without Enchant spell checking installed. PR #190.
* A minor issue with running backups with no backup path set has been fixed. The backups would be written into the source folder, or wherever novelWriter was launched from, which is a very messy fallback. PR #195.

**Documentation**

* Some outdated links and a number of typos and spelling errors have been corrected. PR #173.
* Documentation has been brought up to date with the current set of features of novelWriter. PR #202.

**Project Structure**

* Opening a project now writes a lock file to alert the user if the same project is opened more than once. The warning can be ignored if the user wants to proceed. PR #179.
* Two new meta tags have been added to the project file to store a counter for the number of times the project has been saved or autosaved. The meta information is not currently displayed in the GUI, but could be added to an About Project dialog in the future. The PR also adds checks to ensure XML attributes exist before attempting to load them. PR #180.
* A single line of document meta data is now written to the top of document files. They mainly serve to identify the file content if one opens the file directly in an external editor, but also assist the Orphaned Files tool to identify the files when they are found, but missing from the project tree. PRs #200 and #201.

**Code Improvements**

* For the Outline View, the `NWIndex` class has been restructure and extensively rewritten. It is more fault tolerant, and will automatically rebuild a corrupt index loaded from cache. PR #140.
* The way that dialog options (which options were selected last time a dialog was open) has been rewritten. All data is now stored in a single JSON file in the project meta folder. PR #175.
* Since the config class is instanciated before the GUI, error reporting to the user was tricky. An error cache has now been added to allow non-critical errors to be displayed after the GUI is built. PR #176.
* All source files now have the minimal GPLv3 license note at the top. PR #188.
* Also added license info to the command line output. PR #189.
* Large chunks of the code has been restructured. Mainly the non-GUI parts, which have mostly been merged into a new `core` folder. Several classes which are only used by a single object have been merged into the same file, reducing the total number of source files a bit. PR #199.


## Version 0.4.5 [2020-02-17]

**Features**

* A project can now be opened from the command line by providing the project path to the launching script. PRs #164 and #166.

**User Interface**

* Added functionality to split a document into a folder of multiple documents, and also to merge a folder of documents into a single document. PRs #159 and #163.
* It is now possible to permanently delete files from the Trash folder. This can be done file-by-file or by using the Empty Trash option in the menu. PRs #159 and #163.
* When running the spell checker, a wait cursor is displayed. This will alert the user that novelWriter is working on something when, for instance, a very large document is opened and initial spell checking is running. PR #158.

**Bug Fixes**

* Fixed a few keyboard shortcuts that were not working in distraction free mode. PR #157.
* Added a check to ensure the user does not drag and drop an item into the Orphaned Items folder. Since this folder is not an actual project item, novelWriter would crash when trying to change the dropped item's parent item to the Orphaned Items folder. Now, instead, the drop event is cancelled if the target folder is Orphaned Items. PR #163.

**Code Improvements**

* The way project files are saved has been altered slightly. When a project file or document file is saved, the data is first streamed to a temp file. Then the old storage file is renamed to .bak, and and the temp file is renamed to the correct storage file name. This ensures that the storage file is only replaced after a complete and successful write. PR #165.
* The cache folder has been removed. It was used to store the 10 most recent versions of the project file. Instead, the previous project file is renamed to .bak, and can be restored if opening from the latest project file fails. Any additional restore capabilities should be ensured by backup solutions, either the internal simple zip backup, or other third party tools. PR #165.
* The dependency on the Python package `appdirs` has been dropped. It was used only for extracting the path to the user's config folder, a feature which is also provided by Qt. PR #169.


## Version 0.4.4 [2020-02-17]

* Botched release. Replaced with 0.4.5.


## Version 0.4.3 [2019-11-24]

**User Interface**

* Added keyboard shortcuts and menu entries for formatting headers, comments, and removing block formats. PR #155.
* Disable re-highlighting of open file when resizing window. This is potentially a slow process if the spell checker is on and the file is large. There is no need to do this just for reflowing text, so it is now disabled on resize events. Issue #150, PR #153.
* Improved the speed of the syntax highlighter by about 40% by not using regular expressions for highlighting block formats and by skipping empty lines entirely. PR #154.

**Bug Fixes**

* Fixed an issue when closing the import file dialog without selecting a file, the import would procede, but fail on file not found. The import is now cancelled when there is no file selected. PR #149.
* Fixed an issue with markdown export where it did not take into account hard line breaks. Issue #151, PR #152.
* Fixed a crash when running file status check when the project contains orphaned files. PR #152.


## Version 0.4.2 [2019-11-17]

**User Interface**

* Distraction free mode now also hides the menu bar, but all keyboard shortcuts used for editing remain active. The rest are disabled. PR #142.

**Bug Fixes**

* Fixed various issues with spell checking highlighting. The highlighting and the editor didn't always agree on what words were spelled wrong. PR #141.
* The status bar now shows what spell checking language is actually loaded. Previously, it just showed the language selected in the settings. That was a bit misleading as the available dictionaries can change due to the change in installed dictionary on the system. PR #145.


## Version 0.4.1 [2019-11-10]

**Features**

* If no external spell check package is available, novelWriter can now fall back to use a simple spell checker based on word similarity comparison provided by the Python standard package `difflib`. That means spell checking is always available, although the difflib-based spell checker is both slow and lacks many features of other packages. This feature comes with a general English dictionary, and a GB and US dictionary. These are just lists of correct words provided by aspell. PR #130.
* Language information (spell checker) is now shown on the status bar. In addition, the timer has been converted to monospace font and received an icon. PR #136.
* The new icons exist in both dark and neutral mode, and the mode can be set in the preferences. This makes it easier to see the icons on a dark system theme. PR #135.
* Distraction free mode, key shortcut `F8`, and full screen mode, shortcut `F11`, are now available. This PR also fixes some issues with rescaling of text margins when windows or panels are resized. PR #137.

**User Interface**

* Most text boxes now have a character limit. Before, the only limit was the limit set by Qt itself of ~32k characters. PR #126.
* Key combination `Ctrl+G` is now an alternative to `F3`, forward search, and vice versa for backwards search. This makes more sense on macOS. Issue #124, PR #126.
* The shortcut for the replace feature is now `Cmd+=` on macOS, and remains `Ctrl+H` on Linux and Windows. Issue #124, PR #126.
* The sample project in the source code has been improved to better show the features of novelWriter as they currently are. The old text was a bit out of date. The new text also explains the features it demonstrates. PR #132.

**Bug Fixes**

* Fixed a bug where a long file label would expand the tree pane due to the details panel expanding. The label itself will no longer show more than 100 characters, and is word wrapped. Issue #120, PR #122.

**Code Improvements**

* The code has been reorganised, import headers been cleaned up, and the code made more or less PEP8 compliant. PRs #118, #119, and #138.
* The dependency on the `pycountry` package has been dropped. The feature based on it now uses an internal list of country codes for describing spell checker languages. PR #129.
* The themes manager has been improved, and the loading of icons now supports a number of fallback steps to ensure something is shown in most cases. The final fallback is the system's own icon theme. PR #135.


## Version 0.4 [2019-11-03]

**Features**

* The export dialog now allows limited support for exports using Pandoc. The Pandoc conversion is run as a stage two of the export process. Pandoc integration is fickly on Windows, but works well on Linux. PRs #82 and #104.
* The editor now supports Markdown standard hard line breaks, and exports these correctly to the various file formats and to the document view pane. Hard line breaks can be inserted by either appending two or more spaces to the end of a line, or by pressing `Shift+Enter`. PR #83.
* The editor now supports and preserves non-breaking spaces. Unfortunately, the preservation of these spaces on save and reload is dependent on Qt 5.9 or later. Non-breaking spaces are preserved on export to html and LaTeX. PR #87.
* An option to show tabs/spaces and line endings in the document editor has been added to the Preferences dialog. PR #90.
* The document view pane now has a "Referenced By" panel at the bottom, showing links to all documents referring back to the document being viewed. The panel is collapsible, and has a sticky option that will prevent it from updating if links are followed. PRs #109 and #110.
* The tag and reference system no longer has any restrictions on file class. That is, any file can have tags and references, and they are indexed by the indexer and displayed as links in the document view pane. The timeline view behaves as before, only listing active Novel files. PR #114.
* A new root folder type and keyword for "Entities" has been added. These can be useful for describing plot elements fitting under such a category. PR #115.

**User Interface**

* Tags and references in the editor are now "clickable" in the sense that pressing `Ctrl+Enter` with the cursor on them will open the reference in the view pane. PR #98.
* Warnings triggered when the user tries to use features with missing package dependencies will now provide a link to the package website. PR #86.
* Adding the `~` character in file path boxes is now expanded to the user's home directory. PR #94.
* The recent projects submenu no longer has a number prefix, and a "Clear Recent Projects" option has been added. PRs #86 and #94.
* Syntax themes based on Night Owl and Light Owl themes have been added. PR #97.
* Read-only files now have a notification popping up at the top of the edit pane, and the files are actually not editable. PR #106.
* Tabs are now properly exported in formats where this makes sense. For plain text files, a tab is converted to four spaces. For html exports they are converted to a long space, equivalent to four spaces. PR #113.
* A toggle button in the Document menu now allows displaying file comments in the document view panel. PR #115.

**Bug Fixes**

* Some issues with unicode conversion and LaTeX export have been addressed, but the escaping of unicode characters is prone to errors. The user should be careful with using special symbols if export to LaTeX is intended. The package `latexcodec` should be able to handle Latin based, language specific characters. PRs #73 and #79.
* Fixed some long-standing issues with running novelWriter on Windows. The config folder requires a set of two folders to be created on first use, which the config class did not expect. This is now resolved. In addition, Python does not default to utf-8 when writing files on Windows, so all open statements now have encoding defined. Failing to open files also had the risk of truncating them. This has been avoided by distinguishing new files from broken files. PR #81.
* Dark theme was not rendering properly on multiple platforms. This was resolved by forcing the Qt5 style to "Fusion", which allows further formatting by the novelWriter themes code. The user can override the Qt styling option through the `--style=` flag on the command line. PR #96.
* The behaviour of files in the Trash folder has been fixed. These are now read only. PR #106.
* Fixed a bug where the last line of a title or partition page would be ignored on export. PR #113.
* Drag and drop onto the root level of the tree has been disabled. This was anyway only allowed for root folder items, but it was tricky to enforce this properly for other files. In order to move root folders around now, the move up and down features need to be used instead. #115.

**Installation**

* A script for `pyinstaller` has been added, making it possible to generate standalone executables of novelWriter on at least Windows and Linux. PR #91.
* novelWriter has been made `pip install` ready. PRs #107 and #108.


## Version 0.3.2 [2019-10-27]

**Documentation**

* The documentation has been rewritten and added to the Read the Docs website. Pressing `F1` or `Help > Documentation` in the menu opens the novelWriter documentation page. PRs #68 and #69.

**User Interface**

* Filters have been added to the Timeline View window so unused tags can be hidden, and it's possible to select only certain classes of tags to display. PRs #61 and #62.
* The dialog boxes for Timeline View and Session Log now remember the filter choices from previous instance for the same project. PR #62.
* When having a document open in the editor, text can be imported into it from a plain text file. No formatting conversion of the imported text is performed. That is up to the user. However, this allows for importing novelWriter documents from other projects or from a previous export, partially addressing request in issue #63. PR #65.
* The Export feature now includes exporting to LaTeX, which allows building PDFs with pdflatex or other tools. PR #73.
* Export of a novelWriter flavour markdown file is also supported. This file can be imported back in as-is, and almost completes an export-edit-import cycle. A split document into multiple files feature will be added soon. PR #73.


## Version 0.3.1 [2019-10-20]

**Bug Fixes**

* The backup request dialog should pop up on any change to the project during the last session, not just on unsaved changes. PR #58.
* The regex that searches for words for the spell check highlighter was not including unicode characters, so it would underline parts of words using unicode characters even if the word was spelled correctly. PR #58.
* When having unsaved changes in an open document, while changing editor configuration options, the document would be reloaded from disk when the changes were applied. This meant the unsaved changes were lost. The document is now saved before the editor is re-initialised. PR #58.

**User Interface**

* Added a GUI to display the session log. The log has been around for a while, and records when a project is opened, when it's closed, and how many words were added or removed during the session. This information is now available in a small dialog under `Project > Session Log` in the main menu. PR #59.
* The export project feature now also exports the project to Markdown and HTML5 format. PR #57.


## Version 0.3 [2019-10-19]

**User Interface**

* Added project export feature with a new GUI dialog and a number of export setting. The export feature currently only exports to a plain text file. PR #55.


## Version 0.2.3 [2019-10-06]

**User Interface**

* The search feature now also allows for replacing text, so the basic search/replace tools in now complete. PRs #51 and #52.
* All icons have been removed from the menu, and the dark theme has received a new set of basic icons. They are not very fancy, so will perhaps be replaced by a proper icon set later. PR #53.


## Version 0.2.2 [2019-09-29]

**Bug Fixes**

* Fixed a bug where loading a config file with the dictionary language set to `None`, or presumably a missing dictionary, would trigger a fatal error. PR #47.

**User Interface**

* Added a basic search function for the currently open document. This is a simple interface to the find command that exists in the Qt document editor. It will be extended further in the future. PR #49.


## Version 0.2.1 [2019-09-14]

**Bug Fixes**

* The _Tomorrow_ theme had the wrong set of colours. PR #39.

**Documentation**

* Added the backup feature to the documentation. PR #40.

**User Interface**

* The auto-replace list in project settings is now sorted alphabetically. PR #43.
* Added version checking of the Qt5 and PyQt5 dependencies. Non-essential functionality that depends on very recent versions of Qt5 are now switched off if version is too low. Currently only affects the custom tab stop length, which requires version 5.10. Issue #44, PR #45.

**Code Improvements**

* Minor changes to the About novelWriter dialog and to how backup filenames are generated. PR #41.


## Version 0.2 [2019-06-27]

**Documentation**

* Added documentation in English. The help file opens in the document view pane when the user presses `F1` or selects it from the Help menu. PR #27.

**Themes**

* Complete rewrite of how syntax highlighting and GUI themes are handled. These are now set separately, and the dark theme uses QPalette to handle the dark colours, which makes the dark theme a lot more portable between operating systems. #34 and #35.
* Added the five "Tomorrow" colour themes to list of syntax highlighter themes. PRs #34 and #35.

**User Interface**

* Added a preferences dialog for the program settings. No longer necessary to edit the config file. PR #30.
* The document viewer remembers scroll bar position when pressing `Ctrl+R` on a document already being viewed. PR #28.
* Removed version number from windows title. PR #28.
* The auto-replace items in Project Settings are now editable. PR #29.
* Changed how document margins are handled. This implementation works better and drops the difference between horizontal and vertical margins in favour of using the QTextDocument margin setting. PR #33.

**Code Improvements**

* Spell checking is now handled by a standard class that can be subclassed to support different spell check tools. This was done because pyenchant is no longer maintained and having a standard wrapper makes it easier to support other tools. PR #31.


## Version 0.1.5 [2019-06-08]

**Bug Fixes**

* Closing the application with the window X button, and selecting No on the dialog, still closed the application. Properly handling the close event now so that the closing is cancelled. PR #21.
* Many of the menu option would cause novelWriter to exit or otherwise make mistakes when clicked if no project was open. They all check for this now. PR #23.

**Timeline**

* Added an index to the project that holds the position of all headers in the novel part of the project and all tags set in the notes part. It also holds all the links from novel files to notes. The relationship can be viewed in a new TimeLineView GUI. It's in the tools menu, and can also be opened with `Ctrl+T`. PR #22.
* The spell checker now used this index to highlight keywords/value sets. If the keyword or value is not valid, it will not be highlighted and will instead have a wiggly line under it. This also checks that references point to valid tags. For this to work, the index has to be up to date. The index of a file is saved when the file is saved, but the entire index can be rebuilt by pressing `F9`. PR #22.

**Status Bar**

* Redesign of the status bar adding project and session stats as well as a session timer. PR #21.
* Project word count is written to the project file, which is needed for the session word count. PR #21.
* Closing a project now clears the status bar. PR #21.

**Editor**

* Spell checker now ignores lines staring with `@`, and words in all uppercase. PR #21.
* A document can be closed, which also clears it from last edited document setting in the project file. I.e. it is not re-opened on next start. PR #21.
* Tab width is now by default 40 pixels, and can be set in the config. PR #21.


## Version 0.1.4 [2019-05-25]

**Bug Fixes**

* Fixed a bug where an item had to be selected in the tree view for a root item to be created. PR #16.

**User Interface**

* The main area can now be split into two, with the document editor on the left and a document viewer on the right. PR #13.
* The list of novel document status and plot element importance levels can now be edited through the Project Settings dialog. The values are per project, and saved in the main project XML file. PR #17.
* Cleaned up opening and closing projects, as well as how new projects are created. A new project can also not be saved in a folder already containing a novelWriter project. That was previously possible, resulting in the old XML file being overwritten. PR #18.
* Some minor GUI improvements were added, PR #19:
  * Pressing `F2` also opens the edit item dialog, like `Ctrl+E` does.
  * When the document editor and viewer split slider is moved, the editor resizes properly.
  * The document viewer can be closed, expanding the editor to the full window size again.
  * A project can be closed with `Ctrl+Shift+W`, and the menu entry has an icon.
  * Exit button/menu now asks if you want to close.

**Themes**

* The colours for syntax highlighting can now be edited in a config file in the themes folder. The main GUI css file also lives in the same folder. The default theme lives in the default subfolder, and more folders can be added. Switching themes involve changing the theme setting in the main config file to the name of the themes subfolder. PR #15.

**Code Improvements**

* Loading the project with the items in the wrong order is possible. That is, the child item is stored before its parent. A saved file should not ever be like that, but an edited file might. Even if the file shouldn't be edited manually. PR #16.


## Version 0.1.3 [2019-05-18]

**User Interface**

* The cursor position is now saved when a document is saved, and restored when the document is opened. PR #12.

**Test Suite**

* Major upgrades to the test suite, now also testing GUI elements. Coverage at 73%. PRs #9 and #11.


## Version 0.1.2 [2019-05-12]

**Bugfixes**

* Fixed a critical GUI bug when trying to create new folders and files in the tree.
* Caught a bug when creating a new file, but novelWriter couldn't figure out what class the parent item had and returned a `None`. Could not recreate the bug, but added a check for it anyway.

**Code Improvements**

* Changed the way user alerts are generated, and added the alert levels to an enum class named `nwAlert`. Also added a new level named `BUG`.


## Version 0.1.1 [2019-05-12]

**User Interface**

* Rewritten the spell check context menu. The previous implementation was adapted from a Qt4 example, but could be improved a great deal. It now also doesn't have the default context menu, and allows for adding words to personal word list. Spell checking can also be enabled and disabled from the menu, and re-run on a the current document. PRs #1 and #3

**Test Suite**

* Added a unit test framework based on `pytest`. This currently checks basic opening and saving of the main config file and the main project file. PR #2


## Version 0.1 [2019-05-10]

This is the initial release of a working version of novelWriter, but with very limited capabilities. So far, the following has been implemented:

* A document tree with a set of pre-defined root folders of a given set of classes for different purposes for novel writing. That is, a root item for the novel itself, one for charcaters, plot elements, timeline, locations, objects, and a custom one.
* A plain text editor with a simplified markdown format that allows for four levels of titles, and bold, italics and underline text.
  * In addition, the format supports comments with lines starting with a `%`.
  * It also allows for keyword/value sets staring with the character `@`. These will later be used to link documents together as tags point to other documents. For instance, a scene file can point the keyword `@POV:name` to a character file with the keyword `@THIS:name`.
* The text editor has a set of autoreplace features:
  * Dashes are made by combining two or three hyphens.
  * Three dots are replaced with the ellipsis.
  * Straight quotes with your quote format of choice.
* The text editor also allows for wrapping either selected text, or the word under the cursor, in:
  * Bold, italics, or underline tags.
  * Single, or double quotes.
