.. _a_intro:

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Key Features
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.. _Snowflake: https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/
.. _Markdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown

At its core, novelWriter is a multi-document plain text editor. It uses a markup syntax inspired by
Markdown_ to apply simple formatting to the text. It is designed for writing fiction, so the
formatting features available are limited to those relevant for this purpose. It is *not* suitable
for technical writing, and it is *not* a full-featured Markdown editor.

Your novel project is organised as a collection of separate plain text documents instead of a
single, large document. The idea is to make it easier to reorganise your project structure without
having to cut and paste text between chapters.

There are two kinds of documents in your project: :term:`Novel Documents` are documents that are
part of your story. The other kind of documents are :term:`Project Notes`. These are intended for
your notes about your characters, your world building, and so on.

You can at any point split the individual documents by their headers up into multiple documents, or
merge multiple documents into single documents. This makes it easier to use variations of the
Snowflake_ method for writing. You can start by writing larger structure-focused documents, like
one per act for instance, and later effortlessly split these up into scenes by their headers.

Below are some key features of novelWriter.

**Focus on writing**
   The aim of the user interface is to let you focus on writing instead of spending time formatting
   text. Formatting is therefore limited to a small set of formatting tags for simple things like
   text emphasis and paragraph alignment. When you really want to focus on just writing, you can
   switch the editor into :guilabel:`Focus Mode` where only the text editor panel itself is
   visible, and the project structure view is hidden away.

**Keep an eye on your notes**
   The main window can optionally show a document viewer to the right of the editor. This view
   panel is intended for displaying another scene document, your character notes, plot notes, or any
   other document you may need to reference while writing. It is not intended as a preview panel
   for the document you're editing, but if you wish, you can also use it for this purpose.

**Organise your documents how you like**
   You can split your novel project up into as many individual documents as you want to. When you
   build the project into a manuscript, they are all glued together in the top-to-bottom order in
   which they appear in the project tree. You can use as few text documents as you like, but
   splitting the project up into chapters and scenes means you can easily reorder them using the
   drag-and-drop feature of the project tree. You can also start out with a few documents and then
   later split them into multiple documents based on their headers.

**Multi-novel project support**
   As of novelWriter 2.0, you can have multiple Novel type root folders in a project. This allows
   you to keep a series of individual novels with the same characters and world building in the
   same project, and create manuscripts for them individually.

**Keep track of your plot elements**
   All notes in your project can be assigned a :term:`tag` that you can :term:`reference` from any
   other document or note. In fact, you can add a new tag under each heading of a note if you need
   to be able to reference specific sections of it.

**Get an overview of your story**
   In the :guilabel:`Outline View` on the main window you can see an outline of all the chapters,
   scenes, and sections of your project. If they have any references in them, these are listed in
   additional columns. You can also add a synopsis to each chapter or scene, which can be listed
   here as well. You have the option to add or remove columns of information from this outline. A
   subset of the outline information is also available in the :guilabel:`Novel View` as an
   alternative view to the project tree.

**Get an overview of your story elements**
   Under the document viewer panel you will find a series of tabs that shows the different story
   elements you have created tags for. The tabs are sorted into Characters, Plots, etc, depending
   on which categories you are using in your story. This panel can be hidden when you don't need it
   to free up space.

**Building your manuscript**
   Whether you want to assemble a manuscript, or export all your notes, or generate an outline of
   your chapters and scenes with a synopsis, you can use the :guilabel:`Build Manuscript` tool to
   do so. The tool lets you select what information you want to include in the generated document,
   and how it is formatted. You can send the result to a printer, a PDF, or to an Open Document
   file that can be opened by most office type word processors. You can also generate the result
   as HTML, or Markdown, both suitable for further conversion to other formats.


.. _a_intro_screenshots:

Screenshots
===========

.. figure:: images/screenshot_default.png
   :class: dark-light

   novelWriter with light colour theme

.. figure:: images/screenshot_dark.png
   :class: dark-light

   novelWriter with dark colour theme
