Veronica Berglyd Olsen
80 lines
3.8 KiB
ReStructuredText
80 lines
3.8 KiB
ReStructuredText
.. _a_intro:
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************
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Key Features
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************
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.. _Snowflake : https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/
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At the core, novelWriter is a multi-document plain text editor. It uses a markup syntax inspired by
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Markdown to apply simple formatting to the text. It is designed for writing fiction, so the
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formatting features are limited to those relevant for this purpose. It is not suitable for
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technical writing.
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Your novel project is organised as a collection of separate plain text documents instead of a
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single, large document. The idea here is to make it easier to reorganise your project structure
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without having to cut and paste text.
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You can at any point split documents by their header, or merge multiple documents into single
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documents. This makes it easier to use variations of the popular Snowflake_ method for writing.
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Below are some key features of novelWriter.
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**Focus on writing**
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The aim of the user interface is to let the user focus on writing instead of spending time
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formatting text. Formatting is therefore limited to a small set of formatting tags for simple
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things like text emphasis and paragraph alignment. When you really want to focus on just
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writing, you can switch the editor into :guilabel:`Focus Mode` where only the text editor window
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itself is vissible.
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**Keep an eye on your notes**
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The main window can optionally show a document viewer to the right of the editor. This view
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panel is intended for displaying another scene document, you character notes, plot notes, or any
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other document you may need to reference while writing.
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**Organise your documents how you like**
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You can split your novel project up into as many individual documents as you want to. When you
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build the project, they are all glued together in the top-to-bottom order in which they appear
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in the project tree. You can use as few text documents as you like, but splitting the project up
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into chapters and scenes means you can easily reorder them using the drag and drop feature. You
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can start out with a few documents and then later split the document into multiple documents
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based on its headers.
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**Keep track of your plot elements**
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All notes in your project can be assigned a *tag* you can *reference* from any other document or
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note. In fact, you can add a new tag under each heading of a note if you need to be able to
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reference a specific section. Note tags are organised into categories with specific reference
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keywords.
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**Get an overview of your plot elements**
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In the :guilabel:`Outline View` on the main window you can see an outline of all the chapters,
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scenes, and sections of your project. If they have any references in them, these are listed in
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additional columns. You can also add a synopsis to each document, which can be listed here as
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well. You have the option to add or remove columns of information from this outline. A subset of
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the outline information is also available in the :guilabel:`Novel View` as a replacement for the
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main project tree.
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**Building your manuscript**
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Whether you want to compile a manuscript, or export all your notes, or generate an outline of
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your chapters and scenes with a synopsis, you can use the :guilabel:`Build Novel Project` tool.
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The tool lets you select what information you want to include in the generated document, and how
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it is formatted. You can send the result to a printer, a PDF, or to an Open Document file that
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can be opened by most office type word processors. You can also generate the result as HTML, or
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Markdown, both suitable for further conversion to other formats.
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.. _a_intro_screenshots:
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Screenshots
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===========
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**novelWriter with default theme:**
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.. image:: images/screenshot_default.png
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:width: 800
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**novelWriter with dark theme:**
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.. image:: images/screenshot_dark.png
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:width: 800
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