Getting Started

You can download novelWriter from https://github.com/vkbo/novelWriter/releases

Latest version is 0.6.1:

Extract the archive to a location of your choice.

Installing Dependencies

If you already have Python installed, all you need to do is install the dependencies. To do this, your need to open your command line tool, find the folder where you extracted novelWriter, and run:

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

On some operating systems you need to use python3 instead of python.

The following Python packages are required to run novelWriter:

  • pyqt5 for the GUI

  • lxml for writing project files

Note

Sometimes the SVG graphics package for pyqt5 must be installed separately.

The following are optional, but recommended:

  • pyenchant for spell checking

PyQt/Qt should be at least 5.2.1, but ideally 5.10 or higher for nearly all features to work. Exporting to markdown requires PyQt/Qt 5.14. There are no known minimum for lxml, but the code was originally written with 4.2. The optional spell check library must be at least 3.0.0 to work with Windows. On Linux, 2.0.0 also works fine.

Running novelWriter

If all the required dependencies are met, you can run novelWriter from the command line in one of the following ways:

python novelWriter.py
python3 novelWriter.py
./novelWriter.py

A few switches are supported from the command line, mostly to assist in debugging if an error is encountered. To list all options, run:

python novelWriter.py --help

Building a Standalone Executable

A standalone executable can be built with pyinstaller, using the provided python script “install.py” in the source folder. This script will automatically try to install all dependencies and build the standalone executable of novelWriter. You can run the script by typing the following into your command prompt:

python install.py

If successful, the executable will be in the “dist” folder.

Additional Instructions for Windows

If you don’t have Python installed, you can download it from the python.org website. The installers for Windows are available at https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/

novelWriter should work with Python 3.5 or higher, and the executable installer is the easiest to install. Please note that the pyenchant package for spell checking does not currently work with the x86-64 version, so if you want spell checking, you must install the x86 version.

Also, make sure you select the “Add Python to PATH” option.

_images/python_win_install.png

Once Python is set up and running, you can either run novelWriter from the folder where you extracted it, or you can build an executable and run that from a desktop icon instead.