You can add comments to your text that are not a part of the story. Regular comments are intended
for you to add notes to yourself inside the text, which may be useful when you revise your drafts.
However, there are several types of comments you can use.
This section covers the basic comment types. There are a couple of advanced features that use
comment syntax too, but they are covered later.
Ignored Text
If you want to completely ignore some of the text in your documents, but are not ready to delete
it, you can add %~ before the text paragraph or line. This will cause novelWriter to skip the
text entirely when generating previews or building manuscripts.
This is a better way of removing text than converting them to regular comments, as you may want to
include regular comments in your previews or draft manuscript.
You can toggle the ignored text feature on and off for a paragraph by pressing Ctrl+Shift+D
on your keyboard with your cursor somewhere in the paragraph.
Example
### Scene
%~ This text is ignored.
This text is a regular paragraph.
Comments and Notes#
You can add comments to your text that are not a part of the story. Regular comments are intended for you to add notes to yourself inside the text, which may be useful when you revise your drafts. However, there are several types of comments you can use.
This section covers the basic comment types. There are a couple of advanced features that use comment syntax too, but they are covered later.
Plain Comments#
A plain comment is a line or paragraph that starts with the character
%as its first character. You can put them wherever you like in your documents, and you can choose to include or exclude them from your manuscript.For the most part, novelWriter completely ignores these comments. They are not included in your word or character counts either, and are only displayed in the document viewer panel if you enable them.
Example
### Scene A regular text paragraph in the scene. % A comment you've added for your own notes. Another regular text paragraph in the scene.Synopsis or Description Comments#
A special kind of comments are Synopsis and Short Description comments. They are different from plain comments in that they can be displayed alongside other information about a scene or a character or other story element described in a note. As with plain comments, they can be included in your manuscript, but they are formatted differently than plain comments.
Note
A summary or description comment can be used once, and only once, for each heading as they are considered a description of the content of the text under that heading. If you add two such comments under the same heading, the last one will be used.
Synopsis#
A Synopsis comment is intended for adding a summary of your chapters and scenes.
Example
### Scene %Synopsis: A summary of the content of the scene. The actual scene text.Short Description#
A Short Description comment behaves exactly the same as a synopsis comment, but is intended as a description of a story element, like a character.
Example
Note
The
%Synopsis:and%Short:comment prefixes are interchangeable, but when you include them in the manuscript, they are labelled based on the prefix, so the latter may make more sense for a Character note than the former.Footnote Comments#
Footnotes are added with a shortcode, paired with a matching comment for the actual footnote text. The matching is done with a key that links the two. If you insert a footnote from the Insert menu, a unique key is generated for you. Shortcodes in general are covered in more detail in Formatting with Shortcodes.
The insert footnote feature will add the footnote shortcode marker at the position of your cursor in the editor panel, and create the associated footnote comment right after the paragraph. It will then move the cursor there so you can immediately start typing the footnote text.
The footnote comment can be anywhere in the document, so if you wish to move them to, say, the bottom of the text, you are free to do so.
Footnote keys are only required to be unique within a document, so if you copy, move or merge text, you must make sure the keys are not duplicated. If you use the automatically generated keys from the Insert menu, they are unique among all indexed documents. They are not guaranteed to be unique against footnotes in the Archive or Trash folder though, but the chance of accidentally generating the same key twice in a project is relatively small.
Example
### Scene This is a text paragraph with a footnote[footnote:fn1] in the middle. %Footnote.fn1: This is the text of the footnote.New in version 2.5.
Ignored Text#
If you want to completely ignore some of the text in your documents, but are not ready to delete it, you can add
%~before the text paragraph or line. This will cause novelWriter to skip the text entirely when generating previews or building manuscripts.This is a better way of removing text than converting them to regular comments, as you may want to include regular comments in your previews or draft manuscript.
You can toggle the ignored text feature on and off for a paragraph by pressing Ctrl+Shift+D on your keyboard with your cursor somewhere in the paragraph.
Example
### Scene %~ This text is ignored. This text is a regular paragraph.