Managing Projects

Your text in novelWriter is organised into projects. Each project is meant to contain one novel and associated notes. If you have multiple novels in a series, with the same characters and shared notes, it is also possible to keep all of them in the same project by creating multiple Novel root folders. See How Root Folders Work for more details.

Creating A New Project

You can create a new project from the Project menu by selecting Create or Open Project. This will open the Welcome dialog, where you can select the New button that will assist you in creating a project. This dialog is also displayed when you start novelWriter.

A novelWriter project requires a dedicated folder for storing its files on the local file system. If you’re interested in the details of how projects are stored, you can have a look at the section How Data is Stored.

A list of recently opened projects is maintained, and displayed in the Welcome dialog. A project can be removed from this list by selecting it and pressing the Del key or by right-clicking it and selecting the Remove Project option.

The project list (left) and new project form (right) of the Welcome dialog.

Project-specific settings are available in Project Settings in the Project menu. See further details below in the Project Settings section.

Details about the project’s novel text, including word counts, and a table of contents with word and page counts, is available through the Novel Details dialog. Statistics about the project is also available in the Manuscript Build tool.

Template Projects

From the Welcome dialog you can also create a new from another existing project. If you have a specific structure you want to use for all your new projects, you can create a dedicated project to be used as a template, and select to copy an existing project from the “Prefill Project” option from the New Project form.

Project Settings

The Project Settings can be accessed from the Project menu, or by pressing Ctrl+Shift+,. This will open a dialog box, with a set of tabs.

General Settings

The Settings tab holds the project name, author, and language settings.

The Project Name can be edited here. It is used for the main window title and for generating backup files. So keep in mind that if you do change this setting, the backup file names will change too.

You can also change the Author and Project Language setting. These are only used when building the manuscript, for some formats. The language setting is also used when inserting text into documents in the viewer, like for instance labels for keywords and special comments.

If your project is in a different language than your main spell checking language is set to, you can override the default setting here. The project language can also be changed from the Tools menu.

You can also override the automatic backup setting for the project if you wish.

Status and Importance

Each document or folder of type Novel can be given a “Status” label accompanied by a coloured icon with an optional shape selected from a list of pre-defined shapes. Each document or folder of the remaining types can be given an “Importance” label with the same customisation options.

These labels are there purely for your convenience, and you are not required to use them for any other features to work. No other part of novelWriter accesses this information. The intention is to use these to indicate at what stage of completion each novel document is, or how important the content of a note is to the story. You don’t have to use them this way, that’s just what they were intended for, but you can make them whatever you want.

Both status and importance labels can be exported and imported so you can share them between projects, or define a standard set for all your writing projects. When you import labels to a project, they are always added as new labels.

See also Importance and Status.

Note

Status or importance level currently in use cannot be deleted, but they can be edited.

Text Auto-Replace

A set of automatically replaced keywords can be added in this tab. The keywords in the left column will be replaced by the text in the right column when documents are opened in the viewer. They will also be applied to manuscript builds.

The auto-replace feature will replace text in angle brackets that is in this list. The syntax highlighter will add an alternate colour to text matching the syntax, but it doesn’t check if the text is in this list.

Note

A keyword cannot contain spaces. The angle brackets are added by default, and when used in the text are a part of the keyword to be replaced. This is to ensure that parts of the text aren’t unintentionally replaced by the content of the list.

Backup

An automatic backup system is built into novelWriter. In order to use it, a backup path to where the backup files are to be stored must be provided in Preferences. The path defaults to a folder named “Backups” in your home directory.

Backups can run automatically when a project is closed, which also implies it is run when the application itself is closed. Backups are date stamped zip files of the project files in the project folder (files not strictly a part of the project are ignored). The zip archives are stored in a subfolder of the backup path. The subfolder will have the same name as the Project Name defined in Project Settings.

The backup feature, when configured, can also be run manually from the Tools menu. It is also possible to disable automated backups for a given project in Project Settings.

Note

For the backup to be able to run, the Project Name must be set in Project Settings. This value is used to generate the name and path of the backups. Without it, the backup will not run at all, but it will produce a warning message.