RuscaWriter 0.99

A large release: everything that changed since 0.3, last published on 4 July.

Typesetting

The PDF export now justifies the text, with optional hyphenation, and
carries real bookmarks — the chapter tree readers show in their sidebar.
A cover generator builds a typographic cover from the title and the
author, with a live preview.

Under View → Fonts you now choose two fonts separately: the one you write
in on screen, and the one the exported PDF is set in. Either of the two
built-in faces, or any TrueType family installed on your machine. The export
font is embedded, so the file reads the same on any computer.

Imported text

Most literary plain text has its lines broken at a fixed column. Taken
literally those are line breaks, and the paragraph will not justify in the PDF
or reflow on an e-reader.

Ctrl+Shift+B tints the paragraphs that are broken this way, and Chapter →
Rejoin paragraphs repairs them — verse, lists and quotations are left alone.
Both follow the same rule, so what you see highlighted is what gets joined.
Importing does not do it on its own: it is your text, so the choice is yours.

Importing a Project Gutenberg file no longer drags its header and licence into
the manuscript — about a tenth of the words in a typical file.

Five themes

Ametista, Rubino, Zaffiro, Giada, Ambra — each in a light
and a dark version. Each has its own paper, ink and night ground.

They were built around one measurement. Pure black on pure white gives the
highest contrast a screen can produce, and it is the most tiring thing to look
at for three hours. Every theme here keeps body text between 12:1 and 14:1,
and none of them uses pure black or pure white. The plum of RuscaLinux was
reworked the same way: its bars keep the full colour, but the page no longer
is 21:1.

You can also write your own — a small text file in
~/.config/ruscawriter/themes/, a name and seven colours. The folder ships a
commented example to copy.

Markdown, read the same way everywhere

The rules now live in one place, shared by the PDF typesetter, the HTML, EPUB,
ODT and DOCX exports, the preview and the live highlighting. They used to be
written out separately in each, and the copies had drifted:

• a heading needs a space after the #, as the guide has always shown.
  #Title was a heading in the PDF only, and is now body text everywhere
• _italic_ and __bold__ are highlighted while you type, not only formatted
  on export
• a lone *, as in 3 * 4, no longer turns the rest of the line italic
• nested formatting comes out right in HTML and EPUB too
• a link kept its label but lost its address, so a cited source became
  unreachable. The address is now printed in full beside the label, and never
  as a clickable link — a book gets printed, and on paper nobody can click

A Markdown guide is under Help (Shift+F1).

Fixed

• the writing column could be squeezed into a sliver by the side panels, and
  the bad layout copied itself from one session to the next
• on the first run the text sat in a narrow column between two huge margins
• a maximised window reopened as an ordinary window the size of the screen,
  spilling under the taskbar
• Dark theme and Show line breaks are switches, and now carry a tick when on
• on a cover with only a title and an author, the author was printed twice
• a long cover title ran off the edges, and words could be split across lines

Notes

The repository documents are English only from this release; the Italian
versions were removed rather than left describing 0.3. The teaching mini-editor
docs/mini_ruscawriter.py was removed too — both remain in the history and
under the v0.3 tag.

591 automated tests pass. Requires Python 3, PyGObject and GTK 4. Pillow and
Pyphen are optional.