Veronica Berglyd Olsen
111 lines
5.4 KiB
ReStructuredText
111 lines
5.4 KiB
ReStructuredText
.. _a_intro:
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********
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Overview
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********
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.. _Snowflake: https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/
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.. _Markdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown
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Your novel project in novelWriter is organised as a collection of separate plain text documents
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instead of a single, large document. The idea is to make it easier to reorganise your project
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structure without having to cut and paste text between chapters and scenes.
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There are two kinds of documents in your project: :term:`Novel Documents` are documents that are
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part of your story. The other kind of documents are :term:`Project Notes`, which are intended for
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your notes about your characters, your world building, and so on.
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You can at any point split the individual documents by their headings up into multiple documents,
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or merge multiple documents into a single document. This makes it easier to use variations of the
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Snowflake_ method for writing. You can start by writing larger structure-focused documents, like
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for instance one document per act, and later effortlessly split these up into individual chapter or
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scene documents.
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.. _a_intro_features:
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Key Features
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============
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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 you focus on writing instead of spending time formatting
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text. Formatting is therefore limited to a small set of formatting tags for simple things like
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text emphasis and paragraph alignment. Additional shortcodes are available for special
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formatting cases when you need them.
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When you really want to focus on just writing, you can switch the editor into **Focus Mode**
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where only the text editor panel itself is visible, and the project structure view is hidden
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away.
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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. The viewer
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is intended for displaying another scene document, your character notes, plot notes, or any
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other document you may need to reference while writing. It is not intended as a preview panel
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for the document you're editing, but if you wish, you can also use it for this purpose.
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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 into a manuscript, they are all glued together in the top-to-bottom order in
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which they appear in the project tree. You can use as few text documents as you like, but
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splitting the project up into chapters and scenes means you can easily reorder them using the
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drag-and-drop feature of the project tree. You can also start out with fewer documents and then
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later split them into multiple documents based on chapter and scene headings.
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**Multi-novel project support**
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The main parts of your project is split up into top level special folders called "Root" folders.
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Your main story text lives in the "Novel" root folder. You can have multiple such folders in a
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project, and rename them to whatever you want. This allows you to keep a series of individual
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novels with the same characters and world building in the same project, and create manuscripts
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for them separately.
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**Keep track of your story elements**
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All documents in your project can be assigned a :term:`tag` that you can then :term:`reference`
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from any other document or note. In fact, you can add a new tag under each heading of a note if
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you need to be able to reference specific sections of it, or you want to keep several topics or
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scenes in the same document.
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**Get an overview of your story**
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It is not the documents themselves that define the chapters and scenes of your story, but the
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headings within them. In the **Outline View** on the main window you can see an outline of all
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the chapter and scene headings of each novel root folder in your project. If they have any
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references in them, like which character is in what chapter and scene, these are listed in
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additional columns.
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You can also add a synopsis to each chapter or scene, which can be listed here as well. You have
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the option to add or remove columns of information from this outline. A subset of the outline
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information is also available in the **Novel View** as an alternative view to the project tree.
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**Get an overview of your story elements**
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Under the document viewer panel you will find a series of tabs that show the different story
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elements you have created tags for. The tabs are sorted into **Characters**, **Plots**, etc,
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depending on which categories you are using in your story. This panel can be hidden to free up
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space when you don't need it.
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**Assembling your manuscript**
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Whether you want to assemble a manuscript, or export all your notes, or generate an outline of
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your chapters and scenes with a synopsis included, you can use the **Build Manuscript** tool to
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do so. The tool lets you select what information you want to include in the generated document,
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and how it is formatted. You can send the result to a printer, or generate an Open Document or
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Word Document file that can be opened by most office type word processors. You can also generate
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the result as HTML, or 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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.. figure:: images/screenshot_light.png
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:class: dark-light
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novelWriter with light colour theme
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.. figure:: images/screenshot_dark.png
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:class: dark-light
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novelWriter with dark colour theme
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