Is a document heading mandatory for one-document-per-scene workflows?

[Alok-S-Sharma]

Hi there,

After reading the documentation, I understand that novelWriter builds the novel structure, metadata, tags, references, and outline from document headings rather than from the documents themselves.

This made me wonder about workflows where each document contains only a single scene, chapter, title page, or note.

In such a workflow, the Project Tree label and the first heading inside the document are almost always identical, so every item effectively has to be named twice.

For users who intentionally keep one logical item per document, is the document heading absolutely necessary, or is it mainly required because the current architecture associates tags and references with headings?

Would it be feasible to provide an optional mode where a document with no heading uses its Project Tree label instead? This would avoid maintaining the same name in two places while preserving the current behaviour for users who rely on multiple headings within a document.

I'm mainly trying to understand whether there is a technical or design reason that requires every document to have its own heading in addition to its Project Tree label.

[vkbo]

Please use the discussions feature for asking questions. The issues part is for complete feature requests and bugs.

The short answer to your question is no. novelWriter does not care about your file and folder structure. It only considers the content. So yes, you need a header for a scene if you want the app to know it is a scene. But if you don't care about knowing what is and isn't a scene, you can ignore the headings. Documents don't have to have one, but if they don't, you won't be able to track any information about them since, as you know from the docs, meta data is associated with headings only. Some features still work without a heading though, as the indexer injects a zero-heading without a title in documents without a heading. But this is ignored by the novel and outline views.

The design choice was made to free the user from caring about file structure and be able to change the file arrangement via split and merge whenever they want to. Originally this was to support the Snowflake method, but it works with a lot of workflows. It allows you to organise your project in scene files, chapter files, acts, or the whole thing in a single document if you wish. I've seen people do all of that. I start my own projects by just writing the act-level documents.

As for renaming, if you set the title of your heading first inside the document, all you need to do to rename the document label is to right click it and select "Rename to Heading" (or your localised variation of that).

[Alok-S-Sharma]

Thank you for the detailed explanation. It clarified the design philosophy much better.

I also don't know how I managed to miss the Rename to Heading option, especially since I usually try to keep up with the release notes and new features. I'll give that workflow a try.

Thanks again for taking the time to explain it.