Version 2.4 RC 1

[vkbo]

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 writing projects, and make frequent backups.

Detailed Changelog

Bugfixes

• A number of issues GUI icon scaling has been fixed. Icons and buttons are supposed to scale relative to the GUI font size, but several of them were not. Issue Make GUI scaling from font size consistent #1787. PR Improve GUI scaling #1788.
• The persistence of button state for the editor search box has been improved. The present state was only saved when the search box was actively closed, and there were several scenarios where this didn't happen. The button states are now tracked in the central config, and will always be preserved. Issue Improve document search toggle switch persistence #1794. PR Improve persistence of document search button state #1795.

Other Improvements

• A placeholder icon has been added for cases where users have their own icon theme, and icons are missing. Issue Missing icons when using a custom icon theme #1780. PR Add a new placeholder icon and clean up project search styling #1781.
• The project search now refreshes the search results for the currently open document when it's being edited. PR Add search refresh when document changes #1782.
• When activating project search from the editor while text is selected, the search box is populated with this text. Issue Project search does not pick up selected text #1789. PR Use selected text for project search #1790.

Packaging

• The project has moved from using a setup.cfg to only using the pyproject.toml meta data file for packaging. This is the preferred file format now. PR Move to pyproject,toml #1791.

Code Improvements

• The part of the code related to Qt widgets and flags has been updated and refactored in preparation for the eventual move to the Qt6 framework. Part of issue Move to Qt6 #1142. PR Clean up code in preparation for Qt6 #1792.
• The Open Document writer class has been refactored and improved. PR Refactor ODT writer class #1796.

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This discussion was created from the release Version 2.4 RC 1.

[ahoythedinghy]

You are feature adding essentially the only things I've wished for in novelWriter. Thank you for your work!

[awqk]

Global search update still has a small problem and does not reflect all document changes.
I think it's missing changes when editing while the search update is running.

[awqk]

Ah, you mean the highlighting in the results panel. I see the problem.

• Add the preceding word as well (unless the matching word starts a sentence)? This might give some better sense of the location.
  "John are back in a sequel to My Novel!" --> "...and John are back in a sequel to..."
• choose a different panel class, if there is one, supporting rich text?

[vkbo]

choose a different panel class, if there is one, supporting rich text?

If there was one, I would have already. My only option is to implement my own paint function to draw the different colours. It isn't difficult, I have plenty of those in novelWriter already, but I think performance would be an issue here due to the sheer number of them (potentially). If I was writing C++, instead of Python wrapping C++, I wouldn't hesitate to draw my own widget from scratch.

The welcome dialog project list is custom drawn item widgets, but it's not likely to be such a long list.

In theory, you can have 1000 search results per document in your project. I can of course test it and see if it's a problem. I can also cap the max results to a smaller number, but it can still be pretty big.

[awqk]

I'm no longer sure what the status is on this. Last time I checked (2.4.3) there are no automatic updates of the search results any more. Correct?

[vkbo]

There are no changes to search in the 2.4.x patches after release. I only do fixes in patches.

[vkbo]

I added #1830 to the 2.5 release milestone.