Glossary

Context Menu

A context menu is a menu that pops up when you right click something in the user interface. In novelWriter, you can often also open a context menu by pressing the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+..

Headings

Each level of headings in Novel Documents have a specific meaning in terms of the structure of the story. That is, they determine what novelWriter considers a partition, a chapter, a scene or a text section. For Project Notes, the heading levels don’t matter. For more details on headings in novel documents, see Importance of Headings.

Keyword

A keyword in novelWriter is a special command you put in the text of your documents. They are not standard Markdown, but are used in novelWriter to add information that is interpreted by the application. For instance, keywords are used for tags and references.

Keywords must always be on their own line, and the first character of the line must always be the @ character. The keyword must also always be followed by a : character, and the values passed to the command are added after this, separated by commas.

Novel Documents

These are documents that are created under a “Novel” root folder. They behave differently than Project Notes, and have some more restrictions. For instance, they can not exist in folders intended only for project notes. See the Novel Structure chapter for more details.

Project Index

The project index is a record of all headings in a project, with all their meta data like synopsis comments, tags and references. The project index is kept up to date automatically, but can also be regenerated manually from the Tools menu or by pressing F9.

Project Notes

Project Notes are unrestricted documents that can be placed anywhere in your project. You should not use these documents for story elements, only for notes. Project notes are the source files used by the Tags and References system. See the Tags and References chapter for more details on how to use them.

Reference

A reference is one of a set of keywords that can be used to link to a tag in another document. The reference keywords are specific to the different root folder types. A full overview is available in the Tags and References chapter.

Root Folder

A “Root Folder” is a top level folder of the project tree in novelWriter. Each type of root folder has a specific icon to identify it. For an overview of available root folder types, see Project Structure.

Tag

A tag is a user defined value assigned as a tag to a section of your Project Notes. It is optional, and can be defined once per heading. It is set using the keyword syntax @tag: value, where value is the user defined part. Each tag can be referenced in another file using one of the reference keywords. See Tags and References chapter for more details.