Frequently Requested Features

[vkbo]

Before you make a post requesting a new feature, here are some commonly requested features that will not be implemented.

These are features that have been requested numerous times. While I absolutely appreciate the interest people are taking in my project, novelWriter has a very specific purpose, and I want it to be focused on fulfilling that purpose fairly narrowly. It is a plain text editor for planning and writing novels. It is not a multi-purpose text editor.

Request: Add support for images, lists, or tables

novelWriter does not support structures that aren't plain headers and paragraphs. That includes images and multi-line structures like lists and tables. These are typically needed for technical writing, and novelWriter is not well suited for such projects. This is a deliberate design choice, and not features I haven't gotten to yet.

The end product of a novelWriter project is meant to be a manuscript, not a neatly formatted document. It will only support features that will aid towards that goal. Markup that is important for separating various types of text, like for instance emphasis – and for indicating text flow, like alignment and indent – are within the scope of novelWriter. However, if you're looking for a full featured Mardkown editor, may I suggest GhostWriter instead.

I do see the need for some data structures in notes. The editor and viewer do support tab stops, which makes it possible to line up data in table-like columns using tab characters. These should also be handled properly on exports if the format allows it. There are also bullet characters available if you need to make short lists in your notes. That said, the notes feature is not really designed for full-on research. Personally, I use note-taking software for my background research, and limit the notes in novelWriter to what is directly relevant to the story. For my research, I've found Zim Desktop Wiki to be an excellent note-taking tool. I've recently switched to Joplin for note-taking, which is another excellent tool.

Request: Allow "tagging" characters in the text itself

New users often have a first expectation of the tags and references system working in the same way you tag users here on GitHub and on social media, and therefore occasionally request a similar functionality when they realise this is not what these terms mean in novelWriter.

Meta data is set and collected so you can generate overviews and export the information into drafts so it's easier to check what you intended against what you actually wrote. Setting these references in the text comes with a bunch of issues related to how these would be re-formatted in the final manuscript, because you certainly don't want tags in your manuscript text. It also breaches the separation between meta data and novel text that exists in the app.

If you need to keep the references close to the text, you can always add for instance @char: Bob on the line immediately above the paragraph where Bob enters the scene. The app doesn't care where the meta data lines are in the text.

There are currently no plans to add a new syntax for defining references in the text itself.

Request: Add fountain syntax support for screenwriting

While novelWriter has a bunch of features that may be very convenient for screenwriting, the Fountain syntax is incompatible with the way novelWriter is designed. This is a bit unfortunate really, but I knew nothing about screenwriting when I started working on the app. I am not a screenwriter, so it never occurred to me when I started this project.

If you're looking for a cross-platform, open source tool for screenwriting, I've seen a presentation of Scrite. It is specifically designed for screenwriting and seems to have a lot of neat features.

Request: Have stored file names mirror the project tree structure

The text documents created inside of novelWriter are saved to your hard drive in the project location's contents folder. Each document is saved as a 13 character hash string with a file extension. There are very specific technical reasons for this file structure and there are currently no plans to change the way files are saved to mirror the tree structure seen inside novelWriter.

You are not supposed to edit the project directly on the stored files. This may cause inconsistencies in your project. If you do need to locate a specific file for some reason, there is a ToC.txt file in the project folder that lists which file on the disk corresponds to which document inside novelWriter.

Request: Add cloud or other file sync support

I have no plans to implement a cloud component to novelWriter. Partially because I strongly dislike the cloudification of software, but also because it introduces a bunch of security concerns that I am not willing to deal with. I leave it to the user to decide what sync software to use on their project file storage. A lot of these tools leave a lot to be desired in terms of privacy, but at least then it's the user's choice. novelWriter is specifically designed to work well with file synchronisation tools in that it works on small, plain text files, and do hash checks to prevent unintentional overwrites.

Last Updated: 2024-05-21