Book properties

The Book properties view opens in the right pane when you select “Book” in the tree, or when you click on the toolbar icon. It is the initial view after opening a novelibre project.

Title, description, and author

Title and description are displayed in an editable “index card”.

The editing of book title and author can be completed by pressing the Enter key. Changes to the description are applied when the mouse is clicked anywhere outside the text input field.

After exporting the book to an ODT document, title and description appear in the document properties.

These properties are visible, for example, when the mouse pointer is over the document in the Windows Explorer.

Document language

Expand or collapse this frame by clicking on the label.

• Language code acc. to ISO 639-1

• Country code acc. to ISO 3166-2

This information controls the spelling checker for export documents.

If not set, the System locale setting will be used as default.

Hint

You can also set or change the document language with Writer, then it will be applied on import.

Auto numbering

Expand or collapse this frame by clicking on the label.

Auto number chapters/parts when refreshing the tree

If this checkbox is ticked, all chapters/parts are automatically numbered each time the tree is refreshed. The chapter titles are replaced with a prefix-number-suffix pattern (without the dashes).

Hint

You can optionally exclude individual chapters/parts from auto-numbering in the Chapter/part properties.

Prefix and suffix entries can be completed by pressing the Enter key.

Note

Make sure to add a space character to separate the prefix or suffix from the chapter or part number.

Use Roman chapter numbers

By default, arabic numbers, like “1”, “2”, “3” … are used for auto-numbering. If this checkbox is ticked, Roman numbers, like “I”, “II”, “III”, “IV” … are used instead.

Restart chapter numbering at part beginning

By default, the chapters are numbered consistently across the parts. If this checkbox is ticked, the chapter numbering starts again with “1” in each part.

Renamings

Expand or collapse this frame by clicking on the label.

novelibre provides some ready-made fields for sections and characters to store information that should be at hand when writing. If the default categories do not fit into your individual story planning concept, you can rename these fields. Editing the categories can be completed by pressing the Enter key.

“Not a scene” fields

The heading replacements for Plot progress, Characterization, and World building are used when you set the Scene frame to Not a scene. These categories then apply to all sections that don’t represent scenes.

“Other Scene” fields

The heading replacements for Opening, Peak emotional monent, and Ending are used when you set the Scene frame to Other. These categories then apply to all sections that represent scenes other than “Action” and “Reaction”.

“Character” fields

If you want other categories than Bio and Goals for your characters, you can enter them here. They will then apply to all characters.

Note

If you rename the Bio frame, it will keep the Birth/death date entries anyway.

Narrative time

Expand or collapse this frame by clicking on the label.

To get an overview of the course of the narrative time, you can enter date/time information for each section. The date can be specific (YYYY-MM-DD) or unspecific (number of days, e.g. from the beginning of the story).

Reference date

The reference date is optional. It can be used to convert relative dates into absolute dates, or vice versa. The timeline software plugins may use the reference date for creating events from sections that have no date or an unspecific one.

Format: YYYY-MM-DD, according to ISO 8601.

Hint

Even if you don’t need specific dates for your story, specifying a reference date might be helpful. Thus, a day of the week can be displayed along with the unspecific date, and ages can be calculated for related characters.

Convert dates to days

This transforms specific section dates into days, related to the reference date.

Convert days to dates

This transforms unspecific section dates into specific ones, using the reference date.

Note

For large novels, the conversion may take some time, depending on your system. During the conversion time, the clicked button will display “Please wait …”.

Hint

The commands above convert all dated sections at once. If you want to do the conversion for single sections, just go to the Section properties view.

Writing progress

Expand or collapse this frame by clicking on the label.

With novelibre, you can set a word count target and track your writing progress.

Note

Regardless of the entries made here, you can see the word count in the status bar at any time.

Log writing progress

By default, novelibre stores a log entry with the word counts for each day on which you edit the project. You can prevent this by unticking the Log writing progress checkbox.

Hint

For viewing the daily progress log, you may want to install the nv_progress plugin.

Words to write

Here you can enter a number (without decimal points or separators) indicating your writing goal in words. The entry can be completed by pressing the Enter key.

Starting count

Here you can enter a number (without decimal points or separators) indicating the word count you want to start from. The entry can be completed by pressing the Enter key.

Set actual wordcount as start

Click this button to enter your current word count in the Starting count field.

Words written

Here the difference between your actual word count and the starting count is displayed. The percentage refers to the words to write.

Work phase

This setting is for the tree viewer “Work phase” coloring mode.

• Sections with the same completion status as the selected work phase are black.

• Sections that are ahead of the selected work phase are green.

• Sections that are behind the selected work phase are magenta.

Links

Expand or collapse this frame by clicking on the label.

This is a list for image and research document links.

Although novelibre holds some character/location/item data, it is not the right application for extensive world building. For this, you may want to use more powerful software, like Zim Desktop Wiki. In this case, novelibre allows you to create links to the text files that will take you quickly to the right places in the wiki.

Or you have collected some images that could inspire you when writing. Then simply create links to these images to open them with your system’s standard image viewer.

Tip

If you have collected several images for a character in a folder that your standard image viewer can browse through, a single link to any image file is sufficient.

The links are displayed in a list in the order they are entered.

Add Link

When clicking on , a file selection dialog opens. The selected file will be added to the link list.

Hint

By default, the dialog shows image files. For other file types, change the selector in the lower right corner.

Remove Link

When clicking on or pressing the Del key, the selected link is removed from the list.

Open Link

When double-clicking on a link, or clicking on , the link is opened with the standard application for the link’s file type.

Hint

If you want to open certain linked files with another application than the standard application, you can provide a novelibre “launcher” setting. For this, just create a text file named launchers.ini in the .novx/config directory (where all configuration files are stored). Here you can assign applications to the file extensions.

Zim desktop wiki pages are a special case. For this, the Zim program is assigned to the .zim extension.

This example shows a setting that makes novelibre open text files with the Zim Desktop Wiki application instead of the standard text editor:

[SETTINGS]
.zim = C:/Program Files (x86)/Zim Desktop Wiki/zim.exe

Cover thumbnail

A cover thumbnail is displayed with the book properties if you provide a PNG image file with the project name along with the .novx file. The recommended image width is 100 to 200 pixels.