Version 2026.2 Beta 1

[vkbo]

Release Notes

This is a beta release 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

• Fixed an issue with kerning when printing the manuscript preview on Windows, and changed the page break marker to a dashed line instead of a solid text block. Issue Disable font hinting for manuscript print #2640. PR Manuscript print kerning fix #2838.
• Fixed tooltip and scrollbar colours not matching the selected theme, a compatibility issue with newer versions of Qt; custom stylesheets have been replaced with other styling methods, and the Fusion Qt style is now hard coded, to resolve this properly. Issue Some theme colors broke #2871. PRs Fix styles issues #2877 and Try forcing the tooltip palette #2881.
• Fixed a reentrancy issue when opening documents, and removed a stray call that could delay cleanup of objects, improving overall application stability. PR Stability improvements #2840.
• Fixed five memory leaks related to freeing Qt objects created from Python, and added regression tests to catch similar issues in the future. PRs Memory leak cleanup #2829 and Memory leak regression tests #2830.

Features

• Added EPUB 3 as a new manuscript export format. Issue Add EPUB format #2058. PR Add EPUB format #2283.
• Added dialogue statistics to manuscripts, showing the number of characters used in dialogue and the ratio of dialogue to prose text. The statistics panel has been moved from below the manuscript preview to a new tab in the panel on the left. Issue Add dialogue statistics to manuscript #2096. PR Add manuscript dialogue statistics #2841.
• Added a horizontal rule format for manuscript headings. Using four hyphens ("----") as a heading inserts a line across the page in all output formats. Issue Add horizontal rule <hr> support #2755. PRs Add horizontal rule format for manuscripts #2771 and Update Manuscript tool docs #2772.
• Added a setting for the automatic backup interval, allowing backups to be limited to one per session, day, week, or month by overwriting the previous backup file, using an unambiguous ISO8601-based file name format. Issue Option to Overwrite Previous Automatic ZIP Backup #2754. PRs Add backup interval setting #2834 and Fix weekly backup name format #2835.
• Added a line height setting for the editor and viewer, applied consistently including to pasted text. Issues Editor Line Height #654 and Line height resets when pasted text contains line break #2874. PRs Add line height setting for editor and viewer #2817 and Apply line height on paste #2875.
• Added a text zoom feature for the editor and viewer, using the standard Qt zoom shortcuts. Issue Editor "zoom" (view scaling without changing document font size) #1280. PR Add text zoom in editor and viewer #2822.
• Added highlighting of all search result matches in the editor, in addition to the currently selected one. Issues Highlight all occurences of a search pattern #2736 and Give a fixed width to the Search / Replace Box ? #2798. PR Editor search improvements #2820.
• Added a new format checker that highlights trailing spaces at the end of lines, alongside the existing check for multiple spaces between words. Issue Highlight trailing spaces at the end of lines ? #2800. PR Add a text format check framework #2821.
• Added hover cards for tags in the editor and viewer, with buttons to quickly open the referenced document for editing or viewing. Issue Add hover cards in editor and viewer #2857. PR Add tag hover cards #2859.
• Added filters for text content, document type, and root folder to the project search tool, available in a new collapsible panel below the search box that updates automatically as root folders change. Issues Exclude specific documents within a project from global search? #1927 and Search filters #2256. PRs Add project search filters #2847 and Fix search box not updating on root folder change #2848.
• Added a collapsible panel widget, now used for the item details panel below the project tree and novel view, which can be hidden, and for the new project search filters panel. PR Make it possible to hide the item details panel below the project tree #2843.
• Added support for pasting rich text (HTML) into the editor, without stripping leading or railing whitespace. Issue Allow inserting HTML into the editor #2601. PRs Paste html into editor #2876 and Bug fixes: Daily progress, plain text copy, and paste with whitespace #2878.
• Added project writing goals with daily progress tracking, shown as progress bars with sufficient colour contrast in all themes, and correctly reset when starting a new day. Also added an option to exclude specific root folders from the count. Based on work contributed by @BlayW. Issue Add session word count progress #2223. PRs Add project writing goals #2870, Bug fixes: Daily progress, plain text copy, and paste with whitespace #2878, Various theme fixes #2887, Allow excluding root folders from writing goals #2889, Change daily progress accounting #2891 and Remove the redundant last project count read #2892.
• The symbol auto-replace feature can now also be used in the editor's search and replace boxes, the project search box, and the header format field in Manuscript Build Settings, and can be toggled on or off in each. Issue Editor search: searching for auto-replaced characters #2261. PRs Extend auto replace usage #2866, Extend auto replace, post pr fixes #2867 and Extend auto replace, post pr fix 2 #2868.
• It is now possible to recursively set the active or inactive state of all documents under a folder in the project tree from the right-click menu. Issue Make Inactive Chapters also Disable their corresponding scenes. #2188. PR Recursively set active inactive documents in project tree #2784.
• A checkbox now shows the active project's spell check language in the Tools menu, and the spell checker is re-run automatically when the language is changed. Issue Add a visual indication for selected spell check language in the menu #2311. PR Show active project spell lang in menu #2785.

Improvements

• Manuscript Build Settings now has an option to enable or disable justify-expansion of lines with manual line breaks, extended to Open Document and Word Document formats. Issue Open Doc expands line on Shift+Enter with justified margins #2764. PRs Justify lines on soft break setting and ODT support #2769 and Add missing commit from the justify on line break PR #2770.
• The reference list panel now refreshes automatically when the references in a document change, instead of requiring a manual refresh. Issue Reference list not updated when reference count changes #2124. PR Refresh reference list on changes #2782.
• Keypress handling in the editor's auto-complete menu has been improved: arrow keys navigate the list, Left and Escape close it, and Tab, Enter, Return, and Right accept the highlighted entry or close the menu if nothing is selected. Issue Allow tab key to accept the highlighted element in a drop-down. #2742. PR Improve key press processing in editor completer menu #2743.
• The editor's auto-complete menu has been rewritten to use Qt's native completer widget instead of a custom menu, improving its look and behaviour. PR Editor completer rewrite #2856.
• Performance of the spell checker has been substantially improved by caching computed highlights and dictionary lookups, and syntax highlighting and spell checking are now skipped for excessively long paragraphs (over 20 000 characters) to keep large documents responsive. A related concurrency issue in the background word counter has also been fixed. PRs Spell check word caching #2808, Editor performance, concurrency, and big document handling #2861, Add a spell check cache #2862 and Fix word counter concurrency #2863.

User Interface

• Toggle buttons, such as those in the search tools, are now more visible when active, using a new "toggle" theme colour. A new "searchMatch" theme colour is also used to highlight search matches in the editor and project search results, and now refreshes immediately when switching themes. Existing themes have been updated accordingly, including contributions by @HeyMyian. Issues Make the toggle buttons more visible #2827, New theme colours "toggle" and "searchmatch" #2845 and Some colors don't update on changing theme #2886. PRs Improve toggle button colours #2833, Project search improvements #2844, Search improvements, follow-up #2846, Updates theme colors for toggle and searchmatch #2882 and Various theme fixes #2887.
• Restored the flat look of tabs in tab widgets, now implemented with a custom painter instead of stylesheets for better compatibility with recent versions of Qt. PR Customise tabwidget tabs #2890.
• Fixed handling of long labels in switches, and in the quick link and header navigation menus. PR Minor UI fixes #2850.

Other Changes

• The document editor's underlying text widget has been switched back to a full rich text editor instead of a plain text editor, enabling several of the features in this release, such as line height, zoom, and pasting rich text; copying text from the editor still produces plain text as before. This also required narrowing down when the editor is re-initialised, which had caused some Preferences settings to stop refreshing the GUI properly. Issue Re-implement underlying rich text editor #2815. PRs Switch editor back to QTextEdit #2816, Fix Preferences refresh issues #2860 and Bug fixes: Daily progress, plain text copy, and paste with whitespace #2878.
• Spell checking has been moved out of the syntax highlighter and now runs as a chunked, timed background process, using the same block-based caching approach as the new search highlighting. PR Move spell checking out of the syntax highlighter #2812.
• The application configuration file and all theme files have been converted from Linux-style config formats to TOML. PRs Convert the config file to toml format #2883 and Convert theme files to toml #2885.
• The project search panel has been internally rewritten to use a model/view architecture, with no intended functional change. PR Rewrite project search to model/view #2842.
• Internal handling of icons has been changed, with no expected functional impact. PR Change how icons are handled #2852.
• The viewer code has been merged into the editor folder ahead of further refactoring work. PR Merge viewer folder into editor #2880.
• Cleaned up how menu actions with additional data, such as icons and custom data, are created internally. Issue Clean up actions with additional data #2828. PR Menus cleanup #2832.

Code Maintenance

• Enabled branch coverage in the test suite, added tests for previously uncovered branches, and fixed a few minor bugs found in the process. PR Improve branch coverage #2807.
• Hardened flaky tests to reduce occasional segfaults during test runs. PR Flaky test hardening and lambdas patching #2864.
• Updated the default Python version used for testing and embedded in builds to 3.14. PR Update default Python to 3.14 #2786.
• Updated the Ubuntu versions targeted by packaging and CI. PR Remove Ubuntu 25.10 and add 26.10 #2802.
• Updated icon packages, test helper scripts, and documentation build tooling. PR Utils updates #2853.
• Added tests to the Debian package build process. PR Debian build improvements and 26.2 Alpha 2 #2896.
• Various internal linting, naming, and code style improvements, including dropping the redundant NW prefix from most class names. PRs Update isort rules and add more ruff rules #2779, Code cleanup #2826 and Rename things #2831.

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This discussion was created from the release Version 2026.2 Beta 1.

[lianglivi]

I noticed that the statistics for project plans are based on words rather than characters, which may not be very user-friendly for some languages, such as Chinese. Can we change it to statistics based on the number of characters, or find a way to balance the two. If my suggestion is too complicated, forget it.

[vkbo]

There is a setting to use character counts instead of word counts, but it has not yet been applied to this feature. But I am aware of this, and I can update it to take this setting into consideration. Can you open a feature request issue for it so I don't forget? If you're new to GitHub, just got to https://github.com/vkbo/novelWriter/issues and click "New Issue" and select "Feature Request". You can use the same text as you posted above.