Veronica Berglyd Olsen
58 lines
2.8 KiB
ReStructuredText
58 lines
2.8 KiB
ReStructuredText
.. _docs_usage:
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************
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Introduction
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************
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.. _Markdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown
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In a nutshell, novelWriter is a plain text editor that lets you organise one or more novels, and
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associated notes, as many smaller documents. You can at any time generate standard document formats
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from these plain text documents. Whether it is an outline of your story, a draft, a complete
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manuscript, or even a collection of your character notes or other notes.
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Why Plain Text?
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===============
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The idea is to let you be creative without having to deal with formatting while you are writing, or
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be distracted by it.
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Of course, you probably need *some* form of minimal formatting for your text. At the very least you
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need emphasis. Most people are familiar with adding emphasis using ``_underscores_`` and
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``**asterisks**``. This formatting standard comes from Markdown_ and is supported by novelWriter.
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It also uses Markdown formatting for defining document headings, which is how you distinguish
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between chapters and scenes.
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For those special cases where you need more complex formatting, a set of shortcodes are available.
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To make these codes easier to use, a dropdown button bar is available in the editor panel with
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standard format buttons. So don't worry. You don't have to learn any of these codes.
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Adding Meta Data
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================
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In addition to the body text of your story, novelWriter allows you to enter some additional meta
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data into your text documents to indicate things like which characters are present in a chapter or
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scene, whose point of view we're seeing, what location the events take place in, and so on.
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Since the editor is plain text, this is done on special lines of text starting with an ``@``
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character. The editor will show an auto-complete menu to help you write these lines. We will talk
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more about this later.
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You can also add your own author's comments in your text, without these comments becoming a part of
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the story itself. A comment line starts with a ``%`` character. There are different types of
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comments, and an auto-complete menu can help you here too. More about this later as well.
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.. admonition:: Limitations
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Please keep in mind that novelWriter is designed for writing fiction, so the formatting features
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available are limited to those relevant for this purpose. It is *not* suitable for technical
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writing. It is also *not* a full-featured Markdown editor.
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In addition, novelWriter is not intended as a tool for organising research for writing, and
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therefore lacks formatting features you may need for this purpose. The notes feature is
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mainly intended for character profiles and plot outlines. It is recommended to use a proper
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note-taking tool for research. This is anyway more practical as you may use the same research
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for multiple projects.
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