Are lists completely disabled in formatting?

[PattMayne]

I'm enjoying this app as a more modern alternative to oStorybook. I'm surprised that markdown's list support has been removed and I'm wondering if there's some app-specific alternative to lists (ordered and/or unordered).

In the documentation, the basic formatting says that markdown lists are disabled, and I failed to find any reference anywhere else. HTML

tags don't work either. And it's just kind of ugly to use an asterisk every time.

[vkbo]

It's not been removed. There never were any list support. There is some poorly implemented default list formatting in the editor widget itself, but that has been disabled. HTML tags are not supported either, and won't be for technical reasons.

The whole point of novelWriter is to avoid formatting more than the absolute minimum needed for writing fiction/prose. Originally, only emphasis was supported. The shortcodes were added because Markdown emphasis has its limitations. Indent and alignment was also added later.

Lists aren't really common in novels, which is why they were never a priority to support. It's technically not that tricky to add single level lists, but I've avoided opening the can of worms of complex text structures because I would likely get requests for more.

I sometimes use small lists or tables in my notes. The former is just lines with a marker, so either a dash, an asterisk, or a bullet symbol (available in the Insert menu) will do the trick. For two column information, you can align with the tab key. I use the latter at the top of my character documents to list their personal data. Basically, just write it the old typewriter way.

[PattMayne]

Understood, and thanks for the response. My intention is to use it for plotting and generally organizing my novel rather than the actual writing. But I can do that with minimal editing too.

It's a powerful program, so thanks for sharing it.

[vkbo]

As I implied, adding basic list support isn't out of the question. If we could scope it to just a single level, so no nested lists, then it isn't that big of a deal. Nested lists would require parsing indentation, and only really works if the user has a fixed width font, so that's trickier. Although it could work with the tab key. Adding that would probably only really work with shortcodes like in the old forum days. But they are a little clunky to use for larger sections.

I do see the value in making lists for notes as mentioned, and parsing all lines starting with "* " (the space included) as a list item could work. Also using "#. " for numbered lists should be doable, since those cannot be confused with a header.

[PattMayne]

That all sounds good to me.

Obviously I won't insist on nested lists. But I'd like to explore it a bit here before abandoning it. For unordered lists what if nesting is defined by repeating the asterisk? That wouldn't require parsing indentation.
* level 1
** level 2

The problem then becomes how to deal with numbered lists. Keeping track of the number would be tricky after the user has added nested sub-lists between items.

[vkbo]

Yeah, see this is the kind of complications I'm avoiding by not implementing it at all. 😄

I also thought of repeated asterisk, but it doesn't look very good. In that respect, indentation is probably better. Even with variable width fonts, the space is still the same size. Indentation is already preserved anyway, so maybe supporting indentation wouldn't be so hard. I can tinker with it to see.