Review: Updates to NovelPad | Comfortable Shoes Studio

NovelPad recently made some big updates which addressed a few of the things I wanted to see from them. I’ve cut and pasted this directly from their email, as I couldn’t find a good link to it online.

The last time I sent one of these was over two months ago, but for good reason. On Monday, we released the biggest update to NovelPad ever:

ProWritingAid Grammar and Spellcheck is now included with your NovelPad subscription (and automatically enabled)
Offline Mode
Import from Word, ODT, or a Markdown file
Typewriter Mode
Improved Copy – Paste from Google Docs, Word, and elsewhere
Customizable Default Text Justification
Customizable Page Width
Enhanced Dark Mode updates (now you won’t have as many blindingly white buttons in Dark Mode)

But that’s old news at this point because we’re getting back into our weekly update schedule, and to kick it off here’s what got better in NovelPad this week:

1. Collapsable Chapter Headers

Now you can increase your writing zen when drafting in the Manuscript View by collapsing chapters that you’re not focused on:

2. Manuscript View Remembers Scroll Position

Now every time you navigate within NovelPad or elsewhere, when you return to the Manuscript View, you’ll pick up right where you left off!

3. Word Import Fixes

A couple of minor fixes:

Import from Word no longer underlines italicized text.
Import from Word now properly underlines underlined text.
Import from Word no longer adds a scene separator when any consistently formatted piece of text contains only symbols. (It now requires that the entire paragraph be only symbols, and contain the same formatting throughout.)
Import from Word now sets the default novel width to 6.5in.

4. Total Word Count

This one definitely isn’t ground-breaking, but it was certainly overdue! Now you can see the total word count of your novel on the Analytics Page:

5. Selected Word Counts

When selecting text, the formatting dialog will now show you the Scene word count and the Selected word count:

6. Text Justification

Speaking of the formatting dialog, now we also allow for all four standard text justification methods: Left, Center, Right, and Justified (unsupported in Firefox):

7. Typewriter Mode Scroll Fix

Fixed a bug where replacing text with ProWritingAid in Typewriter Mode would occasionally cause the Manuscript View to scroll to an incorrect position.

8. Unindented First Paragraph

We’ve added a setting that allows you to disable indentation of the first paragraph in each scene. This should make the novel look a bit more “standard” while writing: