novelyst
A novel organizer for writers
novelyst
NOTE: This application will not be continued. It is replaced by novelibre.
novelyst is an organizer tool for writing novels with LibreOffice Writer or OpenOffice Writer. The entire novel is stored in a single file with all additional information. The manuscript is exported for editing with Writer, and then written back so that everything is always consistent and in one place. novelyst uses the file format of yWriter 7 and is largely compatible with it.
novelyst is written in Python and should run on several operating systems.
With the pywoo extension for OpenOffice and the yw-cnv extension for LibreOffice, you can write your edited Office documents back to the project.
Features
- The entire project is displayed in a tree, with branches for the narrative, research, planning, characters, locations, and items.
- Tree elements can be added, moved, and deleted.
- There are three levels: part, chapter, and scene.
- The right sidebar displays the essential properties of the selected element for editing.
- A text viewer window can be toggled on and off.
- There is a wide range of ODF-type file export for OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
- Several reports can be presented in list form.
- The application is ready for internationalization with GNU gettext. A German localization is provided.
Plugins
novelyst’s functionality can be extended by plugins. Here are some examples:
- A button bar
- A simple “markup” scene editor
- An on-demand update checker
- A daily progress log viewer
- A book/series collection manager
- A relationship matrix
- A csv relationship table exporter
- A Timeline plugin
- An Aeon Timeline 2 plugin
- A theme changer
- A Story Template management plugin
There are some more examples in the release’s add-on folder: a yWriter launcher and a simple theme changer.
Requirements
- Python version 3.6+.
- For current Windows versions, use version 3.9.10 or above.
- For Vista and Windows 7, use version 3.7.2.
- Tk support for Python. This is usually part of the Windows Python installation, but may need to be installed additionally under Linux.
- Either LibreOffice with the yw-cnv extension,
- or OpenOffice with the pywoo extension.
Note for Linux users
Please make sure that your Python3 installation has the tkinter module. On Ubuntu, for example, it is not available out of the box and must be installed via a separate package named python3-tk.
Download and install
Download the latest release (version 4.45.1)
- Extract the “novelyst_v4.45.1” folder from the downloaded zipfile “novelyst_v4.45.1.zip”.
- Move into this new folder and open “README.md” for further instructions.
- You may wish to install plugins; the scene editor is highly recommended.
Usage
See the instructions for use
Credits
The icons are made using the free Pusab font by Ryoichi Tsunekawa, Flat-it.
License
This is Open Source software, and novelyst is licensed under GPLv3. See the GNU General Public License website for more details, or consult the LICENSE file.