Veronica Berglyd Olsen
107 lines
5.6 KiB
ReStructuredText
107 lines
5.6 KiB
ReStructuredText
.. _a_intro:
|
|
|
|
************
|
|
Key Features
|
|
************
|
|
|
|
.. _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 also allows for some extended formatting codes
|
|
using a shortcode format. See :ref:`a_fmt_shortcodes` for more details.
|
|
|
|
.. admonition:: Limitations
|
|
|
|
novelWriter 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.
|
|
|
|
It is also not intended as a tool to organise research for writing, and therefore lacks
|
|
formatting features you may need for this purpose. The notes feature in novelWriter is mainly
|
|
intended for character profiles and plot outlines.
|
|
|
|
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 headings 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 chapters or scenes.
|
|
|
|
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 fewer documents and then
|
|
later split them into multiple documents based on chapter and scene headings.
|
|
|
|
**Multi-novel project support**
|
|
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 story 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 to free up space when
|
|
you don't need it.
|
|
|
|
**Assembling 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
|