Dialogue Highlighting#

Dialogue recognition and colour highlighting is available both while you’re writing and in generated manuscript documents.

The default language settings in novelWriter are for English. That includes the dialogue highlighting settings. But many dialogue styles are supported. You can tune a number of settings to fit your language and style preferences in the “Text Highlighting” section in Preferences. You can mix and match these settings.

../../_images/fig_dialogue_highlighting.png — The **Text Highlighting** section of **Preferences**.#

Quoted Dialogue#

By default, dialogue highlighting is enabled for the double quote symbols you have defined in the Quotation Style section of Preferences.

../../_images/fig_dialogue_quote_styles.png — The **Quotation Style** section of **Preferences**.#

You can change which quote symbols are highlighted by selecting one of “None”, “Single”, “Double”, or “Both” from the “Highlight dialogue” setting under Text Highlighting.

You can also enable or disable the “Allow open-ended dialogue” setting to allow for the style where multi-paragraph dialogue is not closed until the last paragraph.

Limitations

Dialogue highlighting for single quotes is difficult to process when the same single quote symbol is also used for apostrophes. There isn’t a good solution to this. Your best option in the cases where the highlighting is wrong is to insert an alternative apostrophe symbol instead. See Modifier Letter Apostrophe for more details.

Alternative Dialogue#

You can use the “Alternative dialogue symbols” setting for custom dialogue wrapper symbols. These are highlighted in a different colour than regular dialogue.

The intended use case here is if you use an alternative style to distinguish a different style of communication. The feature idea came from a science fiction series where mind-to-mind communication used a different quotation style.

Dialogue Line Symbols#

In some languages, a single symbol at the start of a paragraph can indicate that the whole paragraph is dialogue. For instance, this symbol can be a short dash (en dash).

../../_images/fig_dialogue_line.png — An example of dialogue starting with a short dash.#

You can enable this feature by adding the symbols to the “Dialogue line symbols” setting. Multiple symbols are allowed.

Dialogue with Narrator Break#

The dialogue symbol setting will not detect if the dialogue ends in the paragraph. In some styles there is no way to actually indicate the switch from dialogue to narration; in others there are. These a narrator break symbols are usually dashes. You can select one of the supported dash symbols for narrator breaks. These can be used with any of the above dialogue recognition settings.

../../_images/fig_dialogue_narrator_break.png — An example of dialogue starting with a short dash and a long dash narrator break.#

Alternating Dialogue and Narration#

The alternating dialogue and narration style is supported with the “Alternating dialogue/narration symbol” setting. It can be set to one of the supported dashes. This style will switch into dialogue mode when it first encounters the selected dash in a paragraph, and switch back out when it sees the next one, and so forth.

../../_images/fig_dialogue_alternating.png — An example of alternating dialogue and narration using a long dash.#