Release 2.7#

Release Date: June 1, 2025
Patches: 2.7.1

Release Notes#

Release 2.7 features an update of the app icons. In addition, a new style of comments for tracking story structure are available for those that really like to dig into story planning and mapping.

Under the hood, novelWriter has switched to version 6 of the Qt library which is used to draw the user interface. The change has been in the works behind the scenes for a year now, and is finally here. For you as the user it may not be very visible, but it is making it easier to improve colour theme support at the very least. More theme improvements are planned for version 2.8.

Major Theme and Icon Updates#

../_images/2_7_icons.png

The old multi-colour icon theme has been replaced by three new icon themes: Font Awesome 6, six variations of Material Icons, and two variations of Remix Icons. The default theme is Material Icons, but you can change this from Preferences under “Appearance”.

The new icons are single coloured, and use highlight colours from the selected GUI theme. That means the colours of icons will now match the selected theme. In Preferences under “Project View” you can customise the look of the icons used for project items further. By default, root folders and regular folders have separate colours, and the document types retain their colours indicating partition, chapter, scene or notes as before. However, if you prefer all your icons to be one colour, you can pick one of several pre-defined theme colours from these settings. You can also choose to preserve the colour coding of the documents and only set a single colour for the folder icons.

Story Structure Comments#

../_images/2_7_story_structure.png

Story Structure Comments are a new style of comments that can be used to annotate your scenes with structure information. The feature was proposed by Alan Langford in this discussion thread and implemented based on a proof of concept.

A story structure comment consists of the standard comment symbol %, a story keyword and a custom term, before the comment itself. Here’s an excerpt from the documentation written for this feature to explain its usage:

The story term can be anything that you want to track in the manuscript. This construct is intended to make it easier to extract metadata from a work to perform a structural analysis of the story.

There are probably as many ways to examine story structure as there are authors and editors combined. For this reason the story tag is flexible. You can use any terms you want and track any aspect of the story that serves your purposes.

An example method has been advanced by Shawn Coyne in The Story Grid. This method asserts that a story is composed of “beats”, and that each beat has an inciting incident, a complication, a crisis, and a resolution. One might capture these elements of a beat where a character overcomes their fear of giving a speech as:

### Scene

%Synopsis: Carol overcomes her fear of giving a speech.

%Story.incite: Carol is pleased to be invited to a conference to see her boss deliver a keynote.
%Story.complication: Carol's boss calls in sick and asks her to deliver a big speech.
%Story.crisis: Carol has a fear of appearing on stage.
%Story.resolution: Carol engages the help of a coach who helps her overcome her fears and delivers a great speech.

Other analytical models propose tracking a scene’s pace, how it affects the mood of the story, or which element(s) of the story’s genre are being satisfied. An author can use this mechanism to track any element of a scene. Some examples include time of day, how much time passes in the scene, or even the physical form of a shape-shifting character. If a story involves magic, one could track which wand a main character has in hand. It’s up to tha author.

When the story and other scene metadata is extracted into a tabular form, it is possible to get a comprehensive overview of the story and to identify possible issues. For example, so many fast-paced scenes without a break that readers might become fatigued or over-stimulated.

For the time being, the structure comments can be included in the manuscript, or exported to a spread sheet from the Outline View. More ways of displaying these comments will be added in later releases. We’re planning several upgrades to the Outline View for instance.

Manuscript Notes#

While Story Structure Comments are designed for a very specific purpose, Manuscript Notes are more general. They are written the same way though, and you can include or exclude them independently from Story Structure Comments in the Manuscript Build Settings. They are formatted like this:

### Scene

%Synopsis: Carol overcomes her fear of giving a speech.

%Note.consistency: This is where Carol meets her coach for the first time.

More ways to display and search these notes will be added in future releases.

Other Changes#

Under the hood, novelWriter has switched to version 6 of the Qt framework. The main difference for you as a user of the application is better support for High DPI monitors and pixel scaling. This should also include better support for handling different font styles for the editor.

In addition to the above, and other under-the-hood changes, a few smaller improvements have also been made:

  • A new setting in Preferences lets you switch from word count to character count as the main value shown on the main user interface in the project tree, novel view, and on the status bar. Character count is often a more useful statistics in some languages.

  • The thickness of the editor cursor can now be adjusted in Preferences under “Text Editing”.

  • The logic of where new documents are added in the project tree has been enhanced, and hopefully it should pick a sensible location near the document you have selected.

  • Dialogue highlighting for single quoted dialogue in conjunction with apostrophes has been improved somewhat. Distinguishing between the end of dialogue and an apostrophe used to contract the tail end of a word is still not possible, but it should behave better for contractions inside words.

  • Improvements to accessibility has been made in several areas. Screen reader support is improving, but not yet complete, but all switches have been associated with a label now. Keyboard navigation support is improved, especially for switches, and new projects will now generate defaults status and importance labels using shapes in addition to colours to make them easier to distinguish for users with low colour vision.

Patch Releases#

Patch 2.7.1#

Release Date: June 9, 2025

This patch release fixes some issues with tags and references, an issue with the auto-complete menu on Windows, and some issues with the AppImage on Linux. The Czech translation for 2.7 has also been completed.

Older Releases#

Past release packages are available for download on GitHub.

Download Release 2.7
Download Release 2.7 RC 1
Download Release 2.7 Beta 1