Version 2.5 RC 1

Release Notes

This is a release candidate of the next release version, and is intended for testing purposes. Please be careful when using this version on live writing projects, and make sure you take frequent backups.

Detailed Changelog

Bugfixes

• The Status bar LEDs are now properly updated when the theme changes. Issue #1893. PR #1906.
• All HTML tags are now properly closed at the end of each paragraph in HTML output. After shortcodes were introduced, it was possible to leave formatting tags open. Issue #1919. PR #1926.

Improvements

• Move the first line indent setting from being an Open Document feature to a general build settings feature that also applies to HTML, and make it visible in the Manuscript build tool preview. Issue #1839 and #1858. PR #1898.
• Make sure the document in the editor is saved before the same document is opened in the viewer. Issue #1884. PR #1902.
• The project name now appears before "novelWriter" in the main window title, which improves the task bar label on at least Linux Mint Cinnamon, and Windows. Issue #1910. PR #1911.
• Dialogue highlighting now only applies to novel documents, not notes. It is also possible to apply it to HTML and ODT manuscripts, and it also shows up in the preview and in the document viewer. Issue #1774. PR #1908.
• The Welcome dialog and other tools that use the project name to generate files of folder names are now less restrictive on what characters it allows in the file or folder names. Issue #1917. PR #1922.
• Last used folder paths are now remembered individually for each tool or feature that requires path input from the user. Issues #1930 and #1933. PR #1934.
• The Manuscript preview will now show line height as set in build settings. Issue #1920. PR #1935.
• Global search now refreshes if any of the search option buttons are toggled, and the search result will show the complete word if the search term only matches part of a word. Issue #1830. PR #1936.
• When a new note is created from a reference tag in the editor, the syntax highlighting is properly updated to indicate the tag is now valid. Issue #1916. PR #1938.
• The Ctrl+E shortcut now toggles focus between editor and viewer instead of just going to the editor. The header text colour changes to indicate which panel has focus. This should make it easier to scroll the content of the viewer without having to click it with the mouse first. Issue #1387. PRs #1940 and #1941.

Code Improvements

• Change how dialogs are handled in memory, and drop the calls to deleteLater for the underlying Qt object as it caused problems in some cases. Instead, the dialog is disconnected from the parent object, which seems to let the Python and Qt garbage collectors to kick in. PRs #1899. #1913 and #1921.
• Overload the reject call for dialogs rather to call close, which the default implementation does not. This simplifies the logic when closing dialogs, as reject() is also a slot, which close() is not. Issue #1915. PR #1918.
• Processing of dialogue highlighting has been added to the Tokenizer class, and the RegEx handling moved to a separate factory class. PR #1908.
• The progress bar widgets have been moved to a single module, and test coverage added. PR #1937.

Packaging

• The Windows installer is now built with Inno Setup 6.3, and uses zip compression rather than lzma. It also properly sets the undelete icon, and the undelete process is better at cleaning up files. PR #1932.