Expand release notes for 2.6

source/releases/release_2_6.rst

@@ -6,6 +6,8 @@ Pre-Release 2.6 Beta 1
 
 | **Release Date:** November 12, 2024
 
+.. _Issues: https://github.com/vkbo/novelWriter/issues
+
 Release Notes
 =============
 
@@ -17,6 +19,78 @@ Release Notes
    You can follow the development progress on the `2.6 RC 1 Milestone <https://github.com/vkbo/novelWriter/milestone/90>`__.
 
 
+New Manuscript Features
+-----------------------
+
+This release has largely focused on the Manuscript Build tool, and a number of new features have been added. The code behind all the
+output formats has also been extensively restructured to ensure better consistency between the preview and the various outputs.
+
+The Build Settings dialog has also been redesigned to match other, similar dialogs. All customisation settings, aside from the two
+first pages, have been moved into a long, scrollable form with quick-navigations links on the left.
+
+The new features are:
+
+* You can now generate a PDF of your manuscript.
+* You can also generate a Microsoft Word (DocX) document. It should have all the same features as the Open Document format (ODT).
+  The new DocX format has been validated against the document standard and tested in the online Office 365 version. The format is
+  still new, and may have issues, so if you have any problems, please report them on the project's Issues_ page.
+* You can now also control the page break and title centring of the main novel title. This is particularly useful if you want to add
+  text above the title on the cover page, and want to turn off the automatic page break.
+* You can now customise the styling of headings, and even turn them off completely if your manuscript standard calls for headings to
+  be styled the same way as plain text. You can also adjust top and bottom margins of heading types and text paragraphs.
+* Word count statistics, and other related statics values, can be inserted into the manuscript. The value fields must be added to
+  the document itself in the editor, using the new **Insert > Word/Character Count** menu entry. In the document viewer, they are
+  shown as 0, but they are set to the correct value in the Manuscript preview.
+* If you have enabled the option to ignore line breaks in text paragraphs in your Build Settings, you can still force line breaks in
+  the text where you still want them by adding ``[br]`` shortcodes. You can still add a line break after these, for a better visual
+  look in the editor. this will not produce double line breaks.
+* You now have the option to show page breaks in the Manuscript preview panel. They are enabled by default, but can be disabled with
+  a little switch below the preview window.
+
+
+Tags and References
+-------------------
+
+It has always been possible to add a ``@tag`` to your novel documents. However, there was no dedicated keyword to reference these
+tags if you needed to cross-reference between novel documents or from notes. You can now do that with the ``@story`` keyword. It
+works exactly the same as all other reference keywords.
+
+In addition, a new special ``@mention`` keyword has been added. It is intended for referencing story elements that are not present
+in a given chapter or scene, but is discussed. So if your Point-of-View character takes about someone who isn't present in the
+scene, you may still want to indicate that they're mentioned so you can go back later and check for story consistency. This is
+precisely what the ``@mention`` keyword is for.
+
+
+Better Dialogue Highlighting
+----------------------------
+
+The dialogue highlighting was redesigned for 2.5 to not be mere quotes text highlighting, but also support other dialogue styles
+that don't rely on quote symbols like English and other languages do. A few features tailored for Spanish were added in 2.5.
+
+However, the Spanish style did not work for Portuguese and Polish, based on user feedback. In this release, the dialogue
+highlighting has been redesigned again to accommodate more style variations. There are now three highlighting settings in
+Preferences dedicated to this, and you can play around with them to test it out. They are all intended to be used with dashes, but
+you decide what symbols they should detect.
+
+To allow for resolving ambiguities where the syntax highlighter guesses something is dialogue, while the author did not intend it to
+be, you can use a horizontal bar as a replacement for long dash. They look more or less identical in most fonts, and horizontal bars
+are automatically replaced with long dashes in the manuscript. However, the dialogue highlighting feature sees them as different
+symbols. Horizontal bars are inserted automatically in the text when you type 4 hyphens after one another.
+
+
+User Interface Improvements
+---------------------------
+
+There are a few improvements to the overall user interface as well.
+
+* URLs starting with "http" are now clickable in both editor and viewer, and are also exported as links in manuscript documents.
+* A new edit button is available from the top-right corner if the document viewer. Clicking it will open the current document in the
+  document editor.
+* The current open document in the editor is now highlighted in the project tree, just like it is in the novel view.
+* You can now resize the two parts of the details panel below the Outline View.
+* You can select to show the status label and icon for the entries in the Outline View.
+
+
 Download Links
 ==============