Nova 2.5.0

PDF symbols now read as printed, and say-all keeps its place.

• Technical PDFs often embed symbol fonts that report the wrong character for what they actually draw, so equations read as nonsense: an AND dot spoken as "number sign", a multiplication sign as an asterisk or a stray letter, comparison and equals signs disguised as ordinary digits, a micro sign as the letter M - and some symbols, like degree signs and the equals signs of displayed equations, dropped from the text entirely. Nova now checks what a suspect glyph really draws and reads the true symbol: dots, times signs, comparisons, equals and not-equals, degrees, apostrophes, micro signs, circled-plus, and Greek letters such as omega, sigma, and delta. List bullets that some PDFs map onto the letter "u" read as bullets too. Honest fonts are never second-guessed - a genuine number sign or asterisk stays exactly what it is.
• Because this corrects the extracted text of affected PDF pages, saved positions, bookmarks, and highlights inside those particular chapters may land slightly off the first time you reopen such a book after updating. Books and chapters without recovered symbols are untouched.
• Stopping NVDA's say-all and closing the book now saves the position say-all reached. Previously the saved position stayed wherever reading started unless you pressed an arrow key before closing, so reopening jumped you back.
• The section and page shown in the status bar now update the moment Find lands on a match; they used to keep showing where the search started until the next caret move.
• Object navigation now reaches the list before the buttons in the Table of Contents, Bookmarks, and Highlights dialogs, matching standard dialog reading order. (The Library dialog already read correctly.)

Nova 2.4.0

Scanned PDFs no longer trap Nova, and PDF text reads more like the book.

• Opening a scanned (image-only) PDF no longer locks Nova on the "Opening book" screen with no way out. Nova now checks a small sample of pages up front, tells you the PDF has no extractable text, and returns you to the app. The "Opening book" window has also gained a Cancel button — and Escape works too — so a slow open of any book can always be abandoned.
• PDF sentences broken across lines now flow together. Some PDFs lay out a paragraph in a block the layout engine measured against the wrong margin, so its wrapped lines were kept as separate short lines and read as choppy fragments. Those lines are now joined into the sentence they belong to.
• Hyphenated compounds keep their hyphen when a PDF breaks one across lines. A word like "analog-to-digital" split after "analog-" used to come out as "analogto-digital"; the hyphen now stays.
• Key-term lists in PDFs no longer swallow text from a neighboring column. A term's wrapped second line could be welded onto the unrelated term beside it, producing entries that mixed two columns; each term now keeps its own text.

Nova 2.3.0

Reading data that doesn't linger for books you've set aside, and adding books to your library without freezing.

• Reading data no longer lingers for books you've moved on from. Your position, bookmarks, and highlights — and the record of the file itself — are now kept only while a book is in your library or your recent files. When a book leaves both — it ages off the recent list, you clear recent files, or you remove it from the library — that data is forgotten. In particular, "Clear recent files" now clears those books' reading data too, not just the list. Anything you've added to your library keeps its data as before, so shelve a book you want Nova to remember.
• Adding books to your library no longer freezes Nova. Reading each file's details — which for a PDF meant loading the whole file — used to lock the app up with nothing on screen while it worked through your selection. Now an "Adding to Library" window shows which book it's on, the app stays responsive throughout, and you can cancel partway.

Nova 2.2.0

Find that lands on your match instantly, large books that open without locking up, and quicker reading throughout.

• Find lands on your match right away. On a large book, Find no longer scans the whole book before it moves. It jumps to the first match at or after your reading position immediately and keeps finding the rest in the background, so you can step from match to match while it finishes. Repeating a search in the same book is now instant.
• Large books open without freezing. Opening a big PDF used to lock Nova up until it finished loading. Now, when a book takes a moment, an "Opening book" dialog appears and the rest of the app stays responsive while it loads, then drops you into the text when it's ready. Ordinary books still open in an instant.
• Steadier reading on long books. Nova's automatic position-saving no longer causes the occasional brief stall some readers hit on slower or networked drives, and paging into new pages of a large PDF is quicker.
• Faster to start, faster on big files. Nova starts up quicker, very large single-file books — a whole novel in one file — open dramatically faster than before, and the library window no longer hangs when a book's file has been moved or sits on a disconnected drive.

Nova 2.1.0

Cleaner text in scraped books, sharper PDF chapter openers, and a system menu that speaks.

• Books from web-scraping sources read cleanly now. Some EPUBs carry deliberately poisoned text: letters swapped for identical-looking foreign characters (so a word sounds fine but search can't match it and character navigation hits gibberish), invisible characters stuffed between letters, and obfuscated site-name watermarks injected mid-paragraph. Nova now restores the real letters, strips the invisible characters, and removes the watermarks. Genuinely foreign-language text — a Russian book, a quoted Greek phrase — is never touched: the cleanup only acts where lookalikes are posing as English.
• PDF chapter openers read in their true order. Key-terms panels laid out in two side-by-side columns used to interleave their entries line by line and occasionally weld two terms onto one line; they now read down each column in turn, one term per line. Opener introduction paragraphs also flow as continuous prose again instead of one printed line at a time.
• PDF contents pages keep their section numbers. On some contents pages the numbers ("4-4", "4-5", ...) separated from their titles and read out later as a bare list; every entry now reads whole — number, title, page — on its own line. The last few index entries that ran together are fixed by the same change.
• Alt+Space works with a screen reader. Opening the system menu used to snap speech straight back to the reading area, and the menu only started reporting once you arrowed. The menu now announces properly when it opens — matching how current Windows apps behave.

Nova 2.0.0

A ground-up rebuild, PDFs that read like books, and steadier reading on big books.

• PDFs read far more faithfully. Text is no longer doubled or broken mid-word, letter-spaced headings and words split across a line break are rejoined, and print-production debris — layout slugs, figure asset codes, stray control characters — is stripped out.
• Multi-column PDF pages read in true column order. Two-column chapter introductions, the glossary, and the three-column index read down each column in turn instead of zig-zagging line by line, and paragraphs flow as continuous prose rather than one source line at a time.
• Tables and lists keep their shape. Tables hold together while diagrams and prose that only look tabular are no longer mistaken for them; the table of contents, indexes, and glossaries read as lists, one entry per line and in order; numbered and bulleted lists read as lists; and the odd-numbered-answers appendix reads in sequence.
• Figures and worked math stay in place. Margin notes and sidebars read as their own blocks instead of being woven mid-sentence into the body, figure labels stay with their figure, stacked worked math reads top to bottom, and a full-page diagram is announced as an image instead of arriving as a silent, blank page.
• Find counts lines, not repeats. A word that appears several times on one line now counts once, so "Match 3 of 12" means the third of twelve lines that contain your word — the ordinal no longer jumps while a single line is read. Each match parks the reading caret at the start of its line and is announced politely, without cutting off the line being spoken. Every match on every line still highlights.
• Chapter titles repeat less at chapter starts. When a book restates a title — a bare "Chapter 1" followed by "Chapter 1: The Subtitle", or the same words with casing or dash differences — Nova recognizes the restatement and announces the fullest form once instead of two or three times.
• Big books stay responsive. Opening deep inside a long book no longer briefly freezes on your first arrow key, the table of contents opens instantly even on very large books, and the reader renders correctly on any monitor and DPI scale.
• Smaller fixes: reaching the end of a book lands on its real last line instead of a trailing blank, and continuous say-all reading no longer drifts off course deep into a long book.

Nova 1.6.1

Two focus fixes, from the first live installed-mode update.

• After an update installs and Nova restarts, the window now reliably comes to the front. On installed copies the restart follows the silent installer, which left the window in the background; Nova now verifies it actually reached the foreground and retries briefly until it does.
• Switching back to Nova with Alt+Tab when no book is open now re-announces the reading area to screen readers correctly. Previously the fix for this only covered windows with a book open, so a bare Nova stayed silent until a minimize-and-restore cycle.

Nova 1.6.0

A sharper Find, one window instead of two, and sturdier data on disk.

• Find gains a Regular expression option, and the search box now remembers your last ten queries in a dropdown. A mistyped pattern tells you what's wrong with it instead of pretending there are no matches, and Match case / Whole word combine with regex mode as you'd expect.
• Opening a book from File Explorer while Nova is already running now hands the book to the running window instead of starting a second copy of the app. A bare second launch just brings Nova to the front.
• Your library and reading positions are safer on disk: files are written atomically, so a crash or power loss mid-save can no longer corrupt them — and if a library file is ever damaged by outside causes, Nova preserves it for recovery instead of silently starting over. Editing many books at once in the library also writes to disk once instead of once per change.
• If an update check runs into the download service's hourly request limit, Nova now says so plainly — "try again in about N minutes" — instead of showing a bare server error.
• Assorted polish: page highlights repaint more efficiently, searching for a very common single letter no longer builds an enormous match list, and books with unusual characters in their file names survive the update restart correctly.

Nova 1.5.0

Smarter updates, a fuller installer, and a few reading fixes.

• Installed copies now update through the installer, so the version shown in Windows' installed-apps list, the publisher name, and your file associations all stay current after an update. Previously an update only replaced the program files and left that information stale.
• Update reliability fixes: updating while a book is open no longer occasionally leaves Nova open without installing; after an update Nova reopens the book you were reading, at your place; and the window reliably comes to the front once the update finishes instead of hiding in the background.
• The installer now offers a Start Menu shortcut and a desktop shortcut as choices, can optionally remove your Nova data when you uninstall, and lists Nova as "Nova" rather than "nova.exe" in the Windows "Open with" menu. Uninstalling now removes everything Nova added to the registry.
• Chapter titles hold through the whole chapter. Some books split a chapter's text across two internal sections; Nova now keeps naming the chapter as you read into its body instead of dropping to a bare section number. And when a section genuinely has no title, the position no longer repeats the section number after itself ("Section 7 of 220" rather than "Section 7 of 220: Section 7").
• Switching back to Nova with Alt+Tab re-announces the reading area faster.
• Portable copies are sturdier: an older portable copy now marks itself as portable on first run, so deleting its data folder can't accidentally turn it into an installed copy.

Nova 1.4.1

Two fixes for screen-reader users, and shortcut options in the installer.

• Fixed NVDA losing track of the reading area when switching back to Nova with Alt+Tab. It was most noticeable when Nova had been started by opening a book from File Explorer (or through the new reopen-last-book setting), and oddly, going via the desktop with Windows+D and returning worked fine — both quirks of the same underlying timing race, which is now avoided by re-announcing the reader shortly after the window becomes active again.
• The installer's file-associations page no longer announces its heading with a stray "0" after it. Each option now describes itself in full ("Open EPUB books (.epub) with Nova by default"), so the page reads cleanly item by item. The checkboxes themselves always worked.
• The installer offers a Start Menu shortcut (on by default) and a desktop shortcut (off by default) as choices, listed before the file associations.