Formatting Your Text#

The novelWriter text editor is a plain text editor that uses formatting codes for setting meta data values and allowing for some text formatting. The syntax is based on Markdown, but novelWriter is not a Markdown editor. It supports basic formatting like emphasis (italic), strong importance (bold) and strike through text, as well as four levels of headings. For some further complex formatting needs, a set of shortcodes can be used.

In addition to formatting codes, novelWriter allows for comments, a synopsis tag, and a number of keyword and value sets used for tags and references. There are also some codes that apply to whole paragraphs. See Text Paragraphs for more details.

Syntax Highlighting#

The editor has a syntax highlighter feature that is meant to help you know when you’ve used the formatting tags or other features correctly. It will change the colour and font size of your headings, change the text colour of emphasised text, and it can also show you where you have dialogue in your text.

../_images/fig_references.png — An example of the colour highlighting of references. “Bob” is not defined, and “@blabla” is not a valid reference type.#

When you use the keywords to set tags and references, these also change colour. Correct keywords have a distinct colour, and the references themselves will get a colour if they are valid. Invalid references will get a squiggly error line underneath. The same applies to duplicate tags.

There are a number of syntax highlighter colour themes available, both for light and dark GUIs. You can select them from Preferences.

Headings#

../_images/fig_header_levels.png — An illustration of how heading levels correspond to the novel structure.#

Four levels of headings are allowed. For project notes, they are free to be used as you see fit. That is, novelWriter doesn’t assign the different headings any particular meaning. However, for novel documents they indicate the structural level of the novel and must be used correctly to produce the intended result. See Importance of Headings for more details.

# Title Text: Heading level one. For novel documents, the level indicates the start of a new partition. Partitions are for when you want to split your story into “Part 1”, “Part 2”, etc. You can also choose to use them for splitting the text up into acts, and then hide these headings in your manuscript.
## Title Text: Heading level two. For novel documents, the level indicates the start of a new chapter. Chapter numbers can be inserted automatically when building the manuscript.
### Title Text: Heading level three. For novel documents, the level indicates the start of a new scene. Scene numbers or scene separators can be inserted automatically when building the manuscript, so you can use the title field as a working title for your scenes if you wish, but you must provide a minimal title.
#### Title Text: Heading level four. For novel documents, the level indicates the start of a new section. Section titles can be replaced by separators or ignored completely when building the manuscript.

For headings level one through three, adding a ! modifies the meaning of the heading:

#! Title Text: This tells the build tool that the level one heading is intended to be used for the novel or notes folder’s main title, like for instance on the front page. When building the manuscript, this will use a different styling and will exclude the title from, for instance, a Table of Contents in Libre Office.
##! Title Text: This tells the build tool to not assign a chapter number to this chapter title if automatic chapter numbers are being used. Such titles are useful for a prologue for instance. See Unnumbered Chapter Headings for more details.
###! Title Text: This is an alternative scene heading that can be formatted differently in the Manuscript Build tool. It is intended for separating “soft” and “hard” scene breaks. Aside from this, it behaves identically to a regular scene heading. See Hard and Soft Scene Breaks for more details.

Note

The space after the # or ! character is mandatory. The syntax highlighter will change colour and font size when the heading is correctly formatted.

Text Paragraphs#

A text paragraph is indicated by a blank line. That is, you need two line breaks to separate two fragments of text into two paragraphs. Single line breaks are treated as line breaks within a paragraph.

In addition, the editor supports a few additional types of white spaces:

A non-breaking space can be inserted with Ctrl+K, Space.
Thin spaces are also supported, and can be inserted with Ctrl+K, Shift+Space.
Non-breaking thin space can be inserted with Ctrl+K, Ctrl+Space.

These are all insert features, and the Insert menu has more. The keyboard shortcuts for them are also listed in Insert Shortcuts.

Non-breaking spaces are highlighted by the syntax highlighter with an alternate coloured background, depending on the selected theme.

Tip

Non-breaking spaces are for instance the correct type of space to separate a number from its unit. Generally, non-breaking spaces are used to prevent line wrapping algorithms from adding line breaks where they shouldn’t.

Text Emphasis with Markdown#

A minimal set of Markdown text emphasis styles are supported for text paragraphs.

_text_: The text is rendered as emphasised text (italicised).
**text**: The text is rendered as strongly emphasised text (bold).
~~text~~: Strike through text.

In Markdown guides it is often recommended to differentiate between strong emphasis and emphasis by using ** for strong and _ for emphasis, although Markdown generally also supports __ for strong and * for emphasis. However, since the differentiation makes the highlighting and conversion significantly simpler and faster, in novelWriter this is a rule, not just a recommendation.

In addition, the following rules apply:

The emphasis and strike through formatting tags do not allow spaces between the words and the tag itself. That is, **text** is valid, **text ** is not.
More generally, the delimiters must be on the outer edge of words. That is, some **text in bold** here is valid, some** text in bold** here is not.
If using both ** and _ to wrap the same text, the underscore must be the inner wrapper. This is due to the underscore also being a valid word character, so if they are on the outside, they violate rule 2.
Text emphasis does not span past line breaks. If you need to add emphasis to multiple lines or paragraphs, you must apply it to each of them in turn.
Text emphasis can only be used in comments and paragraphs. Headings and meta data tags don’t allow for formatting, and any formatting markup will be rendered as-is.

Tip

novelWriter supports standard escape syntax for the emphasis markup characters in case the editor misunderstands your intended usage of them. That is, \*, \_ and \~ will generate a plain *, _ and ~, respectively, without interpreting them as part of the markup.

Formatting with Shortcodes#

For additional formatting options, you can use shortcodes. Shortcodes is a form of in-line codes that can be used to change the format of the text that follows and opening code, and last until that formatting region is ended with a closing code.

These shortcodes are intended for special formatting cases, or more complex cases that cannot be solved with simple Markdown-like formatting codes. Available shortcodes are listed below.

Shortcodes Formats#
Syntax	Description
`[b]text[/b]`	Text is rendered as bold text.
`[i]text[/i]`	Text is rendered as italicised text.
`[s]text[/s]`	Text is rendered as strike through text.
`[u]text[/u]`	Text is rendered as underlined text.
`[m]text[/m]`	Text is rendered as highlighted text.
`[sup]text[/sup]`	Text is rendered as superscript text.
`[sub]text[/sub]`	Text is rendered as subscript text.

Unlike Markdown style codes, these can be used anywhere within a paragraph. Even in the middle of a word if you need to. You can also freely combine them to form more complex formatting.

The shortcodes are available from the Format menu and in the editor toolbar, which can be activated by clicking the left-most icon button in the editor header.

Note

Shortcodes are not processed until you generate a preview or generate a manuscript document. So there is no highlighting of the text between the formatting markers. There is also no check that your markers make sense. You must ensure that you have both the opening and closing formatting markers where you want them.

New in version 2.2.

Comments and Synopsis#

In addition to the above formatting features, novelWriter also allows for comments in documents. The text of a comment is always ignored by the word counter. The text can also be filtered out when building the manuscript or viewing the document.

The first word of a comment, followed by a colon, can be one of a small set of modifiers that indicates the comment is intended for a specific purpose. For instance, if the comment starts with Synopsis:, the comment is treated in a special manner and will show up in the The Novel Outline View in a dedicated column. The word synopsis is not case sensitive. If it is correctly formatted, the syntax highlighter will indicate this by altering the colour of the word.

The different styles of comments are as follows:

% Your comment text ...: This is a comment. The text is not rendered by default (this can be overridden), seen in the document viewer, or counted towards word counts. It is intended for you to make notes in your text for your own sake, whatever that may be, that isn’t part of the story text. This is the general format of a comment.
%Synopsis: Your synopsis text ...: This is a synopsis comment. It is generally treated in the same way as a regular comment, except that it is also captured by the indexing algorithm and displayed in the The Novel Outline View. It can also be filtered separately when building the project to for instance generate an outline document of the whole project.
%Short: Your short description ...: This is a short description comment. It is identical to the synopsis comment (they are interchangeable), but is intended to be used for project notes. The text shows up in the Reference panel below the document viewer in the last column labelled Short Description.
%Footnote.<key>: Your footnote text ...: This is a special comment assigned to a footnote marker. See Footnotes for how to use them in your text.

Note

Only one comment can be flagged as a synopsis or short comment for each heading. If multiple comments are flagged as synopsis or short comments, the last one will be used and the rest ignored.

Footnotes#

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.

The insert feature will add the footnote shortcode marker at the position of your cursor in the text, and create the associated footnote comment right after the paragraph, and 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 in the first place (1 in 810 000).

This is what a footnote inserted into a paragraph may look like when completed:

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:

%~ This text is ignored.

This text is a regular paragraph.

Tags and References#

The document editor supports a set of keywords used for setting tags, and making references between documents based on those tags.

You must use the keyword @tag: to define a tag. The tag can be set once per section defined by a heading. Setting it multiple times under the same heading will just override the previous setting.

@tag: value: A tag keyword followed by the tag value, like for instance the name of a character.

References can be set anywhere within a section, and are collected according to their category. References are on the form:

@keyword: value1, value2, ..., valueN: A reference keyword followed by a value, or a comma separated list of values.

Tags and references are covered in detail in the Tags and References chapter. The keywords can be inserted at the cursor position in the editor via the Insert menu. If you start typing an @ on a new line, and auto-complete menu will also pop up suggesting keywords.

Paragraph Alignment and Indentation#

All documents have the text by default aligned to the left or justified, depending on your setting in Preferences.

You can override the default text alignment on individual paragraphs by specifying alignment tags. These tags are double angle brackets. Either >> or <<. You put them either before or after the paragraph, and they will “push” the text towards the edge the brackets point towards. This should be fairly intuitive.

Indentation uses a similar syntax. But here you use a single > or < to push the text away from the edge.

Examples:

Text Alignment and Indentation#
Syntax	Description
`>> Right aligned text`	The text paragraph is right-aligned.
`Left aligned text <<`	The text paragraph is left-aligned.
`>> Centred text <<`	The text paragraph is centred.
`> Left indented text`	The text has an increased left margin.
`Right indented text <`	The text has an increased right margin.
`> Left/right indented text <`	The text has both margins increased.

Note

The text editor will not show the alignment and indentation live. But the viewer will show them when you open the document there. It will of course also be reflected in the document generated from the manuscript build tool as long as the format supports paragraph alignment.

Alignment with Line Breaks#

If you have line breaks in the paragraph, like for instance when you are writing verses, the alignment markers must be applied to the first line. Markers on the other lines are ignored. The markers for the first line are used for all the other lines.

For the following text, all lines will be centred, not just the first:

>> I am the very model of a modern Major-General <<
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical

Alignment with First Line Indent#

If you have first line indent enabled in your Manuscript build settings, you probably want to disable it for text in verses. Adding any alignment tags will cause the first line indent to be switched off for that paragraph.

The following text will always be aligned against the left margin:

I am the very model of a modern Major-General <<
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical

Vertical Space and Page Breaks#

You can apply page breaks to partition, chapter and scene headings for novel documents from the Manuscript Build tool. If you need to add a page break or additional vertical spacing in other places, there are special codes available for this purpose.

Adding more than one line break between paragraphs will not increase the space between those paragraphs when building the project. To add additional space between paragraphs, add the text [vspace] on a line of its own, and the build tool will insert a blank paragraph in its place.

If you need multiple blank paragraphs just add a colon and a number to the above code. For instance, writing [vspace:3] will insert three blank paragraphs.

If you need to add a page break somewhere, put the text [new page] on a line by itself before the text you wish to start on a new page.

Note

The page break code is applied to the text that follows it. It adds a “page break before” mark to the text when exporting to HTML or Open Document. This means that a [new page] which has no text following it, it will not result in a page break.

Example:

This is a text paragraph.

[vspace:2]

This is another text paragraph, but there will be two empty paragraphs
between them.

[new page]

This text will start on a new page if the build format has pages.