Veronica Berglyd Olsen
92 lines
4.8 KiB
ReStructuredText
92 lines
4.8 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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.. _Markdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown
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At its 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 available are limited to those relevant for this purpose. It is *not* suitable
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for technical writing, and it is *not* a full-feature Markdown editor.
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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 between chapters.
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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`. These 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 headers up into multiple documents, or
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merge multiple documents into single documents. This makes it easier to use variations of the
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Snowflake_ method for writing. You can focus on writing larger structure-focused documents, like
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one per act for instance, and later effortlessly split these up into scenes by their headers.
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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 panel
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itself is vissible, and the project structure view is hidden 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. 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. 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. You can also start out with a few documents and then later split them
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into multiple documents based on their headers.
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**Multi-novel project support**
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As of novelWriter 2.0, you can have multiple Novel type root folders in a project. This allows
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you to keep a series of individual novels with the same characters and world building in the
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same project, and create manuscripts for them individually.
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**Keep track of your plot elements**
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All notes in your project can be assigned a :term:`tag` that you can :term:`reference` from any
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other document or note. In fact, you can add a new tag under each heading of a note if you need
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to be able to reference specific sections of ot.
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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 chapter or scene, which can be listed
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here as well. You have the option to add or remove columns of information from this outline. A
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subset of the outline information is also available in the :guilabel:`Novel View` as an
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alternative view to the project tree.
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**Building 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, you can use the :guilabel:`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, a PDF, or to an Open Document
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file that can be opened by most office type word processors. You can also generate the result
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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_default.png
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:class: dark-light
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novelWriter with default theme
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.. figure:: images/screenshot_dark.png
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:class: dark-light
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novelWriter with dark theme
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