Version History

New in Notebooks 2.0.2

New in Notebooks 2.0.1

Notebooks 2.0.1 addresses a few interface flaws and minor issues reported by our users.

Plain Text

• Ignore keyboard shortcuts when a document is set as read only.
• Correctly align text on ruled background when overscrolling is enabled.
• Fine tuned the way automatically insert closing characters works.
• Text documents no longer show a dark stripe instead of the scrollbar on macOS 10.13 or earlier, with scrollbars set to "always visible".

Formatted Documents

• When adding a table in the middle of a line, the table is added immediately after the current paragraph.
• Toggling the list style with cmd-i now includes checklists.
• Fine tuned the way automatically insert closing characters works.

Markdown

• Notebooks' default Markdown converter correctly resolves multiple references to the same footnotes.

Outline

• The outline uses the setting Use color label as background color from preferences.
• The selected book's font remains dark (light theme).

Preferences

• There is a new option to select a fixed font size for print and PDF conversion.
• The setting for line spacing accepts all available values.

Sharing...

• Sharing from a document's action menu tries to send the text instead of an attachment, if possible.
• Sharing from the File Menu or document list always sends the selected items as attachment.

Misc

• Duplicating a task with due date copies the due date as well .
• The toolbar buttons appear with correct size and without overlapping title.
• Notebooks no longer quits when closing the last window.
• If the document browser is hidden when closing Notebooks, it remains hidden after relaunch.
• Keyboard shortcut cmd-alt-B shows the document browser.
• Extra document windows are restored in correct back to front order when starting Notebooks.

New in Notebooks 2.0 (Official Release)

Formatted Documents

• New formatted documents use the Title format for the first line.
• Correctly handle continuous spell checking setting.

Plain Text

• Use cmd-7 to toggle comments (lines starting with //).
  (When enabled in preferences, commented lines are ignored during Markdown conversion and word count.)

Document Themes

• Corrected an issue with indented numbered lists in Default Theme.
• Added a new theme: Handbook

Compile Documents

• Make sure that compiled Markdown documents have unique image IDs to avoid that incorrect images are displayed the in compiled result.
• When the compiled result is a Markdown document, don't remove HTML tags which were part of the original Markdown documents.

Create PDF

• With multiple items selected, Notebooks compiles the documents and creates one PDF from the result.

Info View

• When multiple items are selected, the info view displays the number of books and documents, as well as word and character count for selected items.

Document List

• Set a default for Preview Lines in General Preferences. This is the global default for books which don't have an individual (inherited) setting.
• When deleting the contents of a document, the document is removed from the list, but the editor window remains in place.

New in Notebooks 2.0b16 (GM)

Document Styles (for Formatted Documents)

With this update, Notebooks introduces modified and improved document styles.

• The new Default Theme uses colored headings, avoids uppercase in headings, features new table layout and has many smaller improvements.
• If you prefer the old default theme, just pick Legacy.
• Monochrome is the Default Theme without colors.
• Scientific is a variation of Monochrome with automatically numbered Chapters and Sections.
• Scientific + MathJax has MathJax automatically enabled.
• Source Code is a theme that features syntax highlighting. Preformatted text is interpreted as source code.
• Basic is a very basic theme that just makes sure to cover elements and features that are Notebooks specific (checkboxes, page breaks etc.).

For the more technically inclined user: these styles use the @nb_include mechanism introduced a couple of releases ago. They are all based on the Basic theme, which makes sure that Notebooks' settings get applied. Monochrome, for example, includes the Default Theme and just adds a few lines which reset the colors. This way it is very easy to create new themes, and it is even easier to make changes that can apply to multiple themes. - If you want to create your own styles, consider including the Basic theme at the very beginning, too.

Individually set Markdown Converter

• The Markdown converter (Notebooks Default or MultiMarkdown) can be set as property for books and documents, so different items can use different converters without changing preferences.

Document View

• When switching to document only mode (outline and list hidden), the window now shrinks to the size of the document. With center document turned on in preferences, the window size remains unchanged and the document moves to the center of the window – thus providing a light weight distraction free mode (in contrast to fullscreen mode).

Plain Text Documents

• Indent text blocks using the TAB key, outdent with shift-tab. The selection must contain a return.
• Text blocks without leading list marker (starting with space or tab) don't automatically outdent when typing return on an empty line. Use backspace to outdent.

Formatted Documents

• Use cmd-alt - (minus) to insert a horizontal row.
• The ••• menu contains a new option: Insert Page Break. Page breaks are available through Notebooks' new document styles, appear as dashed lines on screen and produce a page break when printed.
• Heading have been renamed to make them more intuitive: Title, Chapter, Section and Subsection. (They are still H1..H4 in HTML terms).
• Addressed the situation that row and column manipulation in tables was non functional.
• Another fix should keep Notebooks from deleting a formatted document which only contains a pasted image.

Compile Documents

• Before compiling documents, the user can set a title for the resulting document.
• Fixed an issue when compiling documents that were selected with select all or with shift click.

Create eBooks

• After creating an eBook, Notebooks displays the result avoid confusion about where the book is stored.
• Incorrect HTML tags, which may have been created by other apps, are replaced during to guarantee books without errors.
• Fixed an issue when selecting documents with select all or with shift click.

Task Lists

• Task icons appear top aligned to make sure they remain in place when a task's state changes.
• When sorting by task state, done tasks are moved to the bottom of the list.
• When task states change during sync, for example, the list is automatically reordered, tasks move to their new positions.

Document List

• When reloading a book which currently displays filtered results, the filter is reset to make sure all documents get displayed.
• The title menus of Recent Items and Recently Modified provide options to set number of items to display.
• Fixed an issue that some tasks were accidentally listed twice in Due Tasks.

Misc

• Duplicate as > Word Document now creates .docx instead of .doc.
• Duplicate Markdown documents as Word, RTF and other formats without converting them to formatted documents first.
• Markdownify (duplicate formatted document as Markdown) correctly converts indented lists and image references.
• Extract context tags: when using scan and extract, make sure to use the tags as defined in settings.
• PDF documents don't show a Find Bar as long as search in PDF is in the works.

Notebooks 2.0b15

Compile Documents

Combine the contents of selected books and documents in a new document.

• The format of the new document is determined based on the formats of the selected documents.
• The sequence of the texts in the compiled result depends on the sequence of selection, and on the selected sort order in books.
• The compiled result can contain all editable document types as well as images, email messages and webarchives.
• The actions to compile documents are available from context menus and the document list's title menu.

Create eBook

Produce an eBook (ePub) from selected books and documents.

• An eBook can contain all editable document types as well as images, email messages and webarchives.
• If the selection contains an image named cover.jpg or cover.png (case insensitive), that image becomes the book cover.
• Title, author, rights, subject and description can be assigned.
• The sequence of selection determines the sequence of documents in the book.
• Actions to create eBooks are available from context menus and the document list's title menu.

Clean up Attachments (NBImages)

Images and other files that are attached to formatted documents or Markdown documents are stored in a hidden book NBImages (each book can contain one). To avoid that unused attachments clutter these books, Notebooks regularly checks if attachments are still referenced and removes the ones that are no longer needed. - This check takes place whenever a book is opened.

Context Tags - Improvements

• When contexts are managed automatically, users can now freely define the prefix characters which denote contexts tags. Notebooks by default uses @ and #, but users are free to set their own characters in addition or instead.
• Notebooks provides a new action to extract embedded context tags from existing documents (available from Context preferences.)
• When renaming or deleting contexts, the user has the choice to automatically adjust context tags in the contents of documents as well.
• When editing plain text documents, typing the tab key after entering the context marker (and a few optional characters) presents a list of available context tags.

Smart Books

• The smart book Due Tasks provides an option "Look ahead for due tasks" in the title menu. This allows Notebooks to list overdue tasks as well as tasks that will become due within the next couple of days.
• The contents of Recent Items and Recently Modified can be filtered (from the search/filter field).
• Selecting a book from the list of search results displays the book's contents, as expected.

Document List

• Task Lists provide an option "Hide Done Tasks" as part of the title menu; the setting is effective globally, the number of done tasks appears in the list's header.
• A right-click on the empty space below the list of documents displays a context menu for the current book - unless a document is selected, in which case the context menu refers to the selected item.
• Reliably add line breaks to the preview of HTML documents.

Document View

• Removed the dedicated info button from the document header; info is available from the ••• menu.
• Email (eml) messages display attachments, or at least links to attachments.
• Improved the presentation of Webarchives on macOS 10.14 when "Open Webarchives with Quicklook" is selected.

Plain Text

• When dropping text or images into a plain text document, the drop position correctly compensates overscrolling.
• The cursor color always picks up the text color.
• Syntax highlighting: comments are gray and oblique (both // and )

Formatted Documents

• The toolbar contains a dedicated "Insert/Edit Table" button. Clicking the button inserts a table, but if cursor is within a table, clicking the button shows actions to add and remove rows or columns.
• The toolbar also contains a new button to "Insert or Remove a Table of Contents". Clicking the dedicated button in the toolbar or selecting the action from the context menu inserts the TOC at the current position, or removes it from the document (there can only be one TOC in a document).
  While editing the document, its TOC is automatically updated.
• The action menu (•••) contains options to "Copy HTML Body" and "Copy HTML Document" (copies the source code, which can be reused in other apps).
• When viewing the HTML source of a formatted document, Notebooks displays the body and skips the header. This behavior can be changed with a new setting in Notebooks' preferences.
• When displaying a formatted document's source, the text is left aligned with hyphenation turned off.
• When an image is pasted into an empty formatted document, a timestamp is automatically assigned as title to avoid that the document is accidentally deleted.
• The new preference setting "Remove redundant styles" allows Notebooks to clean up the HTML source when saving a formatted document. This keeps the documents easy to maintain, but documents copied from websites may change their appearance or functionality.
• Corrected the "Edit Link" action, which now accepts and correctly handles URLs without leading http://.
• Allow users to selectively change font and font size of words, phrases or paragraphs.
• Fixed an issue that text highlighting was accidentally removed while saving the document.
• Fixed a crash when entering a new search term after performing a search.
• Enhanced document themes (this is work in progress).

Misc

• The optional modification date printed as part of the page footer always shows an absolute date (no longer shows 'today' or 'yesterday').
• The service "Notebooks: Insert into current document" works more reliably for formatted documents.
• The Notebooks Menu provides an option to quickly reveal Notebooks' Resource Folder (NBResources).
• When Notebooks' home folder resides on a mounted drive or connected server, deleting items now permanently deletes them when a trash is not available (the user is asked for confirmation).
• When Notebooks was hidden and is brought to the foreground, the current document remains visible and active.
• Corrected the glitch that search sometimes did not reveal all documents containing the given search term (the issue was related to case sensitivity and "word boundaries").
• Added .sh to list of editable filetypes.

Notebooks 2.0b14

Outline

• The section "Smart Books" remembers its expanded/collapsed state between relaunches.
• Clicking the HOME button no longer collapses the outline.
• Improved stability when reordering books or switching sort order.

Document List

• Titles no longer gets clipped with increased font size.
• Clicking the empty space below the list of items selects the current book and updates the info inspector accordingly.
• Right-clicking the empty space shows the context menu with options for the book.
• The list can now use any font with any font face (light, italic etc.) and is no longer hard coded to use bold.
• A new setting "Emphasize Title" gives user the choice to display titles in bold font (enabled by default).
• Cells more reliably update when task details change.

Tasks

• Resolved an issue that caused a crash when leaving repeat details empty.
• Fixed a crash when renaming task which have due dates assigned.

PDF Documents

• Disabled the option "Allow plugins for PDF" to avoid crashes when using Acrobat Acrobat. For now, Notebooks always uses Quicklook to display PDF documents.

Webarchives

• Added an option to view webarchives with Notebooks' own methods instead of Quicklook.
• The action "Duplicate Webarchive as HTML" saves images contained in the archive.

Formatted Documents

• When right-clicking a link, the context menu action "Edit Link" works as expected.
• When selecting text which represents a valid URL, the "Edit Link" action suggests that URL as link target.
• Correctly update wordcount label.
• Added "Show Colors" to context menu.
• Reliably change text color for selected text using the color panel.

Table Support in Formatted Documents

Actions to add and edit tables are currently available from the context menu and via keyboard shortcuts.

• "Add Table" adds a table with four columns, a header row and three (body) rows.
• Rows and columns can be added and deleted with the corresponding context menu actions or - more conveniently - using the following keyboard shortcuts:

Please note that selecting Undo for one of the operations above clears the undo stack for other edit operations in that same table.

Notebooks 2.0b13

Tabbed Windows (macOS 10.13 and above)

• Documents can now be opened in a new tab, which is added to the main window. Tabs can be moved to separate windows or combined with other tabbed window groups.
• Open in New Tab is available from
  • the File menu,
  • a document's action menu,
  • the document list's context menu, and
  • the keyboard shortcut cmd-alt-return.
• Notebooks remembers tabbed windows between relaunches.

Keyboard Shortcuts

With the introduction of tabbed windows we changed one keyboard shortcut (the one for opening the current document in a new window) and added a few new ones:

Checkboxes in Formatted Documents and Markdown

• Checkboxes have been reimplemented and do without checkbox objects (to be precise: we use css classes instead of input elements).
• The functionality is unchanged, checklists created in Notebooks 2.0b12 are automatically converted when opened in Notebooks 2.0b13.
• When using checkboxes in Markdown, please make sure to select the Notebooks Default Converter, because MultiMarkdown does not handle checkboxes at all.

Document

• New setting Center document when hiding left Columns controls whether the document keeps its original width and appears centered with margins, or takes over the whole window when outline and list are hidden.
  This setting also applies to documents that are opened in new tabs.
• Notebooks now uses a shorter autosave interval.

Plain Text

• If a document's text starts with "Title: " (as may be the case in LaTeX, MultiMarkdown, Fountain or other document formats), Notebooks excludes that phrase from the automatically generated title.
• Enabled autocorrection submenu items.

Formatted Documents

• Checkboxes: correctly outdent when typing return on empty line, and remove last checkbox if outdenting (cmd-[) terminates the list.
• When opening a formatted document from the list of search results, make sure to display the first hit and show the correct number of total search hits.
• Search bar does not overlap formatting bar in document-only mode with hidden header and footer.
• To keep the generated HTML code tidy, Notebooks now removes any inline styles from tags when saving the document.

Markdown

• When inserting images,
  • the Markdown code no longer centers images,
  • and the code is compatible with Notebooks' default Markdown converter and MultiMarkdown.
• Added syntax highlighting for CriticMarkup.
• When clicking a formatted Markdown document to start editing at that locatoin, more carefully select the correct cursor position.
• The context menu actions Copy HTML Body and Copy HTML Document copy the formatted version of the document, too, so it can be pasted into apps accepting formatted text.
• Corrected Markdown highlighting for Markdown links and Wiki links.
• MultiMarkdown correctly handles Notebooks' previous way of embedding images.
• Wiki Links are correctly escaped so they are fully compatible with MultiMarkdown (Notebooks' default is less picky).

Document List

• Display date label above title when sorting by creation or modification date.
• New setting Use color label as background color changes the way a document's color label appears: either as colored bullet, or as colored cell background.
• Show a book's description as preview.
• When the setting Show document icons is turned off, smart books do not show task icons, either.
• Improved cell layout for smart books.

Outline

• Clicking an already selected book updates its contents in the document list (especially convenient for smart books).
• Improved drag & drop reordering for books with custom sort order.
• Task counts and sort orders are reliably updated when details change from outside of Notebooks (during sync, for example).
• Using darker disclosure buttons.
• Increased spacing between books, which makes their title easier to read.

Repeating Tasks

• Add or change repeat details from a task's info or by right-clicking a task in the document list. The repeat details are incorporated into the date and time picker.
• When a task with repeat details is completed, Notebooks creates a follow up task with the new due date, and it also creates a duplicate of the original task with the completion date appended to the title. This can be considered a log or history of that repeating task.
• Examples
  • Repeat every 2 weeks: when that task is completed, the next due date is two weeks after the original due date; if that date is in the past, Notebooks keeps adding 2 weeks until the next due date is in the future.
  • When done, repeat after 2 weeks: when the task is completed, the next due date is in two weeks from now.

Info Panel

• Display and set repeating task details.
• Changing task details adjusts the details of all selected tasks.
• Text in the Description field is correctly wrapped.

Fixes and Corrections

• When moving documents to different books, more carefully look at embedded images or attachments and copy them to the new location.
• The Notebooks Server looks for a free port instead of using a fixed number.
• Avoid saving plist for documents that have just been deleted.
• When deleting a document which is currently shown in a separate tab or window, that window is closed.
• Plain text documents displayed in separate windows correctly scroll and align their background patterns.
• Reduced interference between automatically scrolling the current line to the center of the window and the user's scrolling gesture.
• Evernote Import: while extracting notes, Notebooks displays a progress indicator and provides an option to cancel the import. It no longer becomes unresponsive when extracting a huge number of notes.

Notebooks 2.0b12

Markdown

• MultiMarkdown 6 is now available as an optional Markdown converter, can be selected in preferences.
  (We are considering an option to select the Markdown converter for books or documents individually, because of the strongly diverging feature set of Notebooks' default converter and MMD.)
• Don't make Markdown documents editable when clicking a link.

Wiki Links

• Remove percent encoding from title.
• When expanding paths with TAB, insert the path in correct case.

Outline

• When deleting an item that is just being renamed, make sure not to rename the next selected book.
• Avoid empty title when clearing a book's title and typing return.

Document List

• Show in Enclosing Book is available for books, too (search results, smart books).

Formatted Documents

• Open embedded image in new window from context menu.

Info View

• When saving a property, make sure not to overwrite the description which may just have been edited.

Contexts

• Reliably detect tags at the beginning of the text.

Misc

• Formatted Document as default type was not correctly saved.
• Layout improvements in outline and document list.
• Evernote Import: correctly convert checkboxes, and add links to open embedded images and PDFs.
• Addressed a crash when using Acrobat Reader to view PDF documents. - Still causes issues occasionally.
• macOS 10.11: avoid broken layout when resizing a window which displays a PDF document.

Notebooks 2.0b11

A few Highlights at a Glance

• Interactive checklists in formatted documents and Markdown.
• Click on a formatted Markdown document to start editing the text at that exact position.
• Overscrolling in plain text (scroll beyond the bottom of the text).
• Support for Wiki type links [[...]] and auto-expansion for paths in Wiki and Markdown links.
• Hide document when selecting a new book.
• Nested document styles.

Documents - General

• Notebooks uses a new default font: Muli
  If you prefer Notebooks' previous default font, just select Source Sans Pro in Notebooks' preferences.
• A new Action menu ••• is available from the document's header, providing access to frequently used actions.
• New action Rename document to first line of text, available from the new action menu.
• The new option to hide the current document when selecting a different book presents a placeholder page when switching books, providing a quick option to create a new document. - This new setting is active by default.
• More carefully reload or update the current document when it is changed on disk.
• When adding attachments to Markdown or formatted documents, Notebooks checks if an attachment with identical contents already exists and reuses that rather than creating a duplicate.

Formatted Documents

• Interactive checklists are available as a new list type. Like other lists, they can be nested. States are toggled by clicking the checkboxes. - These lists provide a convenient way to quickly write down a simple todo list which does not need any of Notebooks' advanced task management functions.
  These checklists are not fully compatible with earlier versions of Notebooks. While earlier versions correctly display the lists, it is not possible to toggle tasks.
• The action Remove Format from Selection is available from the context menu rather than from the Font menu.
• Formatted documents accept dropped audio and video files, and correctly handle link and copy (using modified keys on the keyboard).
• New action to colorize/highlight text. The function is toggled using the H button from the formatting bar. Right click the button to select the highlight color.
• When inserting a URL with no text selected, the link's title is inserted as text. (With text selected, the link is placed "around" the selection.)
• When pasting text with images into a new document, the images are reliably added as attachments.
• When the window becomes too narrow and toolbar buttons need to be remove, their actions are accessible from the ••• menu.

Plain Text

• Scroll beyond the bottom of the text with Overscrolling. The function can be toggled from the View menu or with cmd-alt-O. When active, overscrolling helps keep the current line centered on screen.
• Paste as Markdown has been extended and now pastes Markdownified versions of copied HTML text and URLs. This action is available from the context menu and from the keyboard shortcut cmd-alt-V.
• Line Numbers (cmd-alt-L) correctly top/bottom align with the text and pick up the current background color.
• Improved performance for indenting and updating numbered lists.
• Notebooks now offers a selection of styles to emphasize the current line
  • highlight the current line (the original yellow overlay has been replaced with Notebooks blue)
  • draw a vertical bar at the left edge of the line
  • draw a thin stripe below the current line
• Users have now three options to keep current line "pinned" while typing:
  • keep the line centered,
  • keep it at the bottom of the top third of the window
  • keep it at the top of the bottom third of the window.

Markdown

• - [ ] checklists are now handled like lists, so they can be indented and nested. Add a new checkbox/task by typing return, use TAB or cmd-] or cmd-[ to indent and outdent. Type return on an empty line to terminate the list.
• These checkboxes are now active: clicking them in the formatted version adjusts their state in the plain text version.
• New option Click formatted Markdown to edit at position: with this option active, users can click on a word or any position in the formatted version of a document to switch to plain text and start editing at the clicked position. So it is no longer necessary to first switch to plain text and then look for the correct text position. - This behavior can be turned on and off in preferences.
• Added support for Wiki style link syntax: write [[Details.md]] instead of [Details](Details.md).
  • To support nested brackets we slightly changed the way Notebooks handles "insert closing characters": type [ twice for the nested brackets, type once more to remove the brackets. (In other cases, typing the opening character twice removes both, opening and closing characters.)
  • During Markdown conversion, these Wiki links are converted to regular Markdown links; the given link's filename is used as link text.
• Auto expand file paths when editing Wiki or Markdown links: when typing TAB inside [[]] or [](), Notebooks tries to expand the leading text fragment to a valid link to a document in Notebooks.
  • Start with / for global links (starting at Notebooks' root), other links are interpreted as relative to the current book.
  • Parent books can be referenced with /../.
• Added support for "Combined Markdown" (for legacy support).

Outline

• Notebooks remembers open/expanded books between restarts.
• Books' color labels are displayed as bullets.

Document List

• Optimized cell layout: title and dates appear more emphasized.
• Create PDF for selected items from the context menu.

Search

• New option to search all books, can be toggled with the checkbox that appears right next to the search field when search is active.
• The number of search results is shown in the title.

Contexts

• Correctly handle "/" and umlauts in tag names.
• Make sure that the smart book appears when enabling contexts for the first time after initial launch.
• The smart book is displayed even if no context have been defined.

New Keyboard Shortcuts

Changed Keyboard Shortcuts

The shortcuts to switch between view modes (three panes - two panes - document only) have changed:

The same actions can be performed from the three buttons in the window's toolbar.

Nested Document Styles

Notebooks now supports nested document styles., which makes it easy to create new styles based on existing ones. The syntax looks like this:

<style type="text/css">

// add the styles' name without path and extension;  
// Notebooks looks at its own styles and at /NBResources/CSS  

@nb_include: "Basic";           
@nb_include: "Default Theme";     

// your own styles go here  

</style>

It may be important to know that the styles are embedded – not just referenced – to make sure that the final formatted document can be shared and reused in other applications.

Notebooks' default styles are now based on the Basic style, so in the example above, including Default Theme would actually be sufficient.
You can of course include any other style as well, and it is sufficient to add the style's name; path or file extension are not necessary, Notebooks looks for its embedded styles and for custom styles in /NBResources/CSS.

Misc

• The window's toolbar contains a dedicated Home button and an extended + menu with New from Pasteboard.
• Open in new window: Notebooks remembers the window positions between relaunches.
• On startup, Notebooks tries to avoid that the same document is presented in the main window and in a separate window.
• The individual sizes for outline and document list are reliably stored between relaunches.
• Various interface refinements.

Notebooks 2.0b10

New: Wiki Style Links

This is an enhancement of how Notebooks' internal links work, which makes it possible to reference documents independent of their file extension, or reference documents before they exist, and to define their titles from within the referencing document.

A brief recap of how to use Notebooks links:

• Copy a document's or book's link from the File menu, or by right-clicking it's title in the outline or document list, and then paste it into a document.
• Paste in plain text or Markdown document produces a link like notebooks://Projects/Overview.md or notebooks://show/Projects/Overview.md
• Paste as Markdown, available for plain text and Markdown documents, produces a link like [Overview](/Projects/Overview.md); that link appears as clickable link like Overview in the formatted view.
• In formatted documents it is best to use the insert URL option from the ••• button.

Clicking any of these links opens the referenced/linked document. Up to now, Notebooks displayed an error message if the target did not exist.

With this update we change the way Notebooks handles the situation when a link's target document does not exist. To stick with the above example: notebooks://Projects/Overview.md

• Notebooks first looks for the document Overview.md located in the book Projects and opens it, if it exists.
• If the document does not exist, Notebooks looks for any document with title Overview, ignoring the file extension, in that same book and opens it, if it exists. So now a document's file extension is less important, because Notebooks finds the target even if it has been converted from txt to html, for example.
• If no matching target can be found, Notebooks offers to create a new document, which makes it possible to add a link to a document that does not yet exist at the time of writing; the document can be created by clicking the link. This is far more convenient than first creating a new document, copying its link and then returning to the referencing document to paste the link.

(This is an area that can be much more enhanced, but we leave that for later...)

New: Line Spacing

The line spacing parameter can be set like font, color and other attributes. The global default is set in Notebooks' preferences, but it can be overridden by individual settings for books and documents (info). Line spacing is applied to all editable document types.

Formatted Documents

• New formatting buttons for sub- and superscript.
• New option to insert HTML code (available from the ••• button).

Markdown

• Added support for github style checkboxes, which are rendered as graphic check boxes
  • - [ ] marks an open task
  • - [x] marks a completed task
• Markdownify: improved layout for lists in generated Markdown code.

Printing (enhancements)

• Correctly align footer when printing formatted documents.
• Plain text documents use correct paper size and margins and no longer resizes the text.
• Plain text documents print the current selection or the whole document.
• Plain text documents now generate identical results in print and as PDF.
• PDF documents print without extra margins.

Outline

• Books are sorted by title – ascending or descending – or according to custom sort order. The sort order can be selected from the document list's header.
• Reorder books by dragging them in the outline (user defined sort order must be selected for a target book to accept reordering).

Contexts

• When refreshing contexts (right click on Contexts smart book), books were accidentally ignored. Fixed.
• The Contexts smart book reliably shows a disclosure triangle when context tags have been defined (especially on startup).

Notebooks 2.0b9

Mojave specific changes and corrections (macOS 10.14)

• Task states can be changed by clicking the task icon.
• Notebooks' interface automatically adapts to Mojave’s dark theme setting (on Mojave there is no option to enable dark mode from within in Notebooks).
• Improved dark theme colors.

Task Lists

• When turning off Show as Tasklist, Notebooks automatically archives the current task states and due dates without prompting the user; reverting the book to a task list restores the original states and due dates.
• Task lists have a new option Reset Tasks… to reset all states and remove due dates. This is convenient for reusing shopping lists, pack lists and other generic lists.
• The Info window provides a checkbox to turn books into task lists. This is one more option to toggle this setting, and it also fixes the bug that books were treated like tasks.

Document List

• PDF documents are displayed with a thumbnail or a generic icon. The generic icon is the new default, but the setting can be changed in Preferences > General. (Using generic icons opens books with PDF documents faster.)

External Documents (not residing within Notebooks' current hierarchy)

• If an external document has its own plist file (maybe it resides in an alternative Notebooks hierarchy or the user has assigned properties to this document), Notebooks correctly retrieves its properties and falls back to default settings if needed. Previously, Notebooks always applied default settings.

Other Improvements and Changes

• When launching Notebooks in document only mode (outline and document list hidden), the document appears correctly centered and no longer occupies the whole window.
• When opening a document, Notebooks now more precisely scrolls to the last visited location (it scrolls to the beginning of the paragraph that appeared at the top of the screen when the document was closed last time).

Notebooks 2.0b8

New: Fulltext Search for Markdown

Notebooks 2.0b8 enables Spotlight to index the contents of Markdown documents, which macOS cannot do by default. After installing Notebooks 2.0b8 you may notice that your Mac starts indexing your files, which may take a few moments or minutes at most.

New: Option to Hide .plist Files

This new setting in Notebooks' preferences makes all plist files invisible in Finder. When made active, Notebooks immediately hides all existing or added plist files. Turning the setting off reveals the plist files again.

Viewing External Documents in Notebooks

Dropping external files (files that don’t reside in Notebooks' hierarchy) onto the Notebooks icon opens them in a separate window. The documents can be edited in place, taking advantage of Notebooks' functionality. This beta contains a few improvements:

• Notebooks tracks changes of the document’s contents and reloads its contents if necessary.
• If the document is moved or renamed, Notebooks follows the document to its new location.

External documents can be moved or copied by dragging the icon in the window’s title bar. So it is easy to move an external document into a specific book in Notebooks simply by dragging that icon, for example.

Full Screen

Full Screen mode in Notebooks is primarily meant to provide a distraction free writing environment and has received a few improvements and convenience methods in this update.

• Hide left columns when entering full screen: automatically hide outline and document list when switching to full screen, and show them again when leaving this mode. The document appears centered, the page width of the document depends on the next setting.
• Use document’s width as full screen page width: keep the document’s width unchanged when switching to full screen mode and back. The document’s layout, line breaks etc. remain identical, so it is easy to keep track of editing when switching modes.
• In full screen - document only mode (with the left columns hidden), the view menu provides a slider to change the width of the displayed page. The selected width is displayed in the document’s status bar. This is the default page width when the setting above is disabled.

Dark Theme

• In dark mode, the background color of lists and documents is now gray by default (which better integrates with Mojave), but the color can be changed to black in preferences.

Outline

• Dropping an item onto the “BOOKS” header in the outline adds it to Notebooks' top level.
• Changing task lists correctly updates the task badges (this corrects a glitch introduced in the previous beta release).
• Symbolic links to folders are correctly displayed.

Document List

• Clicking the list’s title displays a context menu with actions for the current book.
• Correctly enable/disable the Show as Task context menu item.
• Open enclosing Book works from search results, as expected.
• With outline hidden, click and hold the Back button to jump to Notebooks' top level.
• Corrected a few display glitches in the list of Recently Modified items.

Formatted Documents

• Opening a formatted document applies the current document style (font, size, colors etc) on the fly, but the result is no longer automatically saved as in previous beta versions. In order to save the style, the document needs to be modified.
• When dropping files into a formatted document, the user can now decide whether to copy the contents (insert a photo or a document’s text) or add a link to the original file. The function is controlled with the usual modifier keys.
• Refined methods for automatically handling closing characters
  • avoid double closing characters
  • when deleting an opening character which is immediately followed by a closing character, delete both.

Plain Text

• When dropping files into a plain text document, the user can now copy the contents or add a link to the original file (as above).
• When updating numbered lists, take the first line’s number as starting point and no longer force lists to start with “1”.
• Refined methods for automatically handling closing characters (as above).

Improvements

• When renaming documents by changing the first line of text, Notebooks now uses case insensitive compare to avoid issues with Dropbox or case insensitive file system.
• The Notebooks server now displays correct hostname settings.
• Improved compatibility with macOS 10.11

Notebooks 2.0b7

New: Import From Evernote

To import your Evernote notes and documents into Notebooks just follow these steps:

1. Export your notes from Evernote in XML format (.enex)
2. Import the enex file into Notebooks; you probably want to create a new book in Notebooks and drag the enex file into that book, because Notebooks saves the extracted notes in that same book.
3. In Notebooks, select the enex file and click on Click to extract and import...
4. Notebooks extracts all notes with attachments, creation date, tags etc.

We would appreciate your feedback on the quality and result of the extraction process, because we were not yet able to extensively test it with a wide variety of documents.

Documents

• New: Dropping email messages into plain text or formatted documents creates a link to the message with the subject as link text.
• Improved: Dropping links from Safari's address bar into plain text documents creates a link, using the page title as link text.
• Changed: Hide header/footer implementation has been changed to avoid side effects with find bar or custom document formats.
• Changed: Images are displayed with a small border when viewed full screen.
• Changed: PDF documents are always displayed with Preview as plug in; custom plug ins like Adobe Acrobat are disabled to avoid side effects.
• Changed: In formatted documents, the Remove Format from Selection is also available from the Format menu.
• Changed: The word/character counter is hidden for non-editable documents.
• Fixed: Option to renumber list was accidentally disabled when Detect and align list was enabled.

Document List

• New: Use and display the color label that has been assigned in Finder if no color label is set in Notebooks.
  (Notebooks' labels are not yet saved to Finder.)
• New: Apply Current Style to formatted documents from context menu and Format menu. This action applies the selected document style to formatted documents or imported HTML documents.
• Changed: With Custom Sort Order selected, new documents are always added at the top of the list.

Contexts

• Fixed: Documents with umlauts in their titles no longer show up twice in the same list.

Document Info

• Fixed: Changing background or font colors no longer closes the info window.

General

• Expiration date is Oct 31 (the date is displayed in the About window)

Notebooks 2.0b6

NEW - Support for Services

Selecting text in any macOS application and opening Services from the application menu (or clicking the right mouse button) provides three Notebooks specific services:

• Add selection as plain text creates a new text document from the selected text and saves it at Notebooks' top level.
• Add selection as rich text: same as above, except that Notebooks saves the selection as RTF. The result is not editable in Notebooks, but can be converted to editable formats.
• Insert selection into current document: when a document is open and actively editing (the cursor is visible) in Notebooks, this action inserts the selected text at the current cursor position. This allows the user to collect snippets of text into a single document.

New - Support for Fountain document format

This format for screenwriters is handled liked Markdown: the documents are edited as plain text and viewed in their formatted version.

Document View

• The Sort Lines method provides options for case sensitive and descending sort orders.
• New option to fade document's header and footer when sidebar and document list are hidden, or when when document is opened in a separate window.
• The new toggle view button in the document header provides another way to switch between formatted and plain text views. The same action is available as cmd-return and from the View menu.
• The Dark theme setting changes the color of editable documents as well (white on black). This can be turned off from the View menu.

Printing and PDF Creation

• Added options to print document header (the document's title) and footer (modification date, page number). The same setting applies to generated PDF documents. The new options are available from the print dialog.
• Improved page layout.
• Avoid printing dark background or too light font colors.

Document List

• Improved preview text for formatted documents (more reliably skip the title from the preview).
• Show preview for .htm documents.
• When renaming books or tags, avoid duplicates.
• Change a document's filetype by adding the new path extension the document's title (this works even if show filename extension is turned off.)
• The search field features a white background (light theme) to make it more prominent.

Sidebar

• Avoid duplicates when renaming books or context tags.
• Context tags are sorted by alphabet.

Info Window

• Improved user interface for changing creation date and due date
  • It is more obvious that these dates can be modified
  • The user can either change the date manually (by typing it in) or by selecting it from a calendar. This can be controlled in General preferences.

Contexts Tags

• The lists of context tags are sorted by alphabet (custom sort is currently not supported).
• When contexts are managed automatically, only tags starting with # and @ are deleted when their last item is removed. This seems more obvious, because these tags are extracted from document's contents as well. Other tags are not automatically removed when empty.
• When adding a new context tag, Notebooks now makes sure that its title is unique.
• Tags that are extracted from documents are no longer limited to alphanumeric characters. Use space, "," and ";" as separator, but all other characters are accepted.

Corrections

• The navigate back/forward buttons no longer open the new document in all windows.
• The source code of .htm files can be edited like .html files.
• When selecting a new document, the find bar is removed in case it was open in the previous document.
• New documents are reliably saved in the "expected" parent book, so it should no longer happen that a new document accidentally ends up at Notebooks' top level.

Known Issues

When line numbers are active plain text, there is UI glitch when fading header and footer. This will be addressed fro the next update.

Notebooks 2.0b5

Plain Text

• When editing ordered lists, Notebooks updates the numbers to guarantee a correct sequence. In cases where that fails, the new menu action "Update Numbered List" can help.
• New menu action "Sort selected Lines" to sort the selection by alphabet.
• Indenting sections with cmd-] works as expected even if the first paragraph of the selection is not indented.
• Refined behavior of TAB button, deciding when to indent the paragraph and when to insert a TAB (inserts at the beginning of the paragraph only). To enforce indent, please use cmd-]
• Custom background patterns are correctly displayed.

Formatted Documents

• Closing the formatting bar by tapping the (x) button deactivates editing, hides the cursor and makes links clickable again (they are not active while typing).
• Reliably save changes when the title (first line) has been changed.
• Dragging items into a formatted document immediately makes it editable, which ensures that changes are saved.
• Use cmd-] and cmd-[ to indent or outdent sections.
• New setting "Use Tab to indent"; when on, typing TAB indents the current paragraph; when off, simply adds a tab character.
• Use cmd-K to insert or edit a link at the current selection.
• New setting "Open Links in Browser" keeps Notebooks from opening linked URLs in its own window.
• When viewing a Markdown document, right-clicking the text provides an option to copy the whole HTML document (in addition to copying the HTML Body only). - Convenient for pasting the result into a website or blog.

Editing - General

• Option "Automatically insert closing characters": typing characters like "(" automatically adds the closing character, unless the current cursor position is followed by a regular character (beginning of a word, for example). Selected text is enclosed with those characters, but if the selection is already enclosed, those characters are removed. - Works with ([{`"
• Improved interaction with main menu (correctly activate/deactivate menu entries depending on the currently selected object).

Context Tags

• When toggling contexts in preferences, the smart book is shown or hidden.
• Assign books to contexts from the Info window or by drag & drop; books are correctly displayed as children of context tags.
• Adding context tags in info window
  • While typing, Notebooks presents a list of tags already in use
  • To confirm a tag, type ","
  • The list of contexts in the outline updates on the fly.
• After deleting items from the list, Undo works as expected and brings back the deleted items.
• Row Actions
  • Swipe left across a document in the list to delete.
  • Swipe right for Info.

Outline (left column)

• Correctly update title color and disclosure triangle when contents is added or removed.
• The section headers no longer float at the top of the list, but scroll with the contents.

Document List

• Optimized layout of document list (title, preview, dates)
• Improved visual feedback and animations when adding, deleting or renaming items in Notebooks or in Finder.
• The "Delete" warning displays the affected document's path extension.

Info Window

• Correction to setting due dates and alert time (setting the alert time no longer resets the date).

Notebooks Server

• When changing Notebooks Home, the server changes its root folder as well and displays the new Notebooks Home's contents.

Notebooks 2.0b4