More options for HTML export

[Ostsol]

The current options for export are rather sparse and there are a few things I think could improve it:

Custom page width:
The current implementation calls for 800px wide pages with 40px margins. This is easily alterable by editing the HTML file, but perhaps it would be good to have this as an export option for those without a background in HTML and CSS.

Multi-file export:
Some authors might want to publish their book on the web with each chapter as a separate page. It may be good to provide an options to select what content gets their own separate files. For example: title page, chapters, scenes, etc.

Separate CSS file:
Currently, the stylesheet definition is inlined into the HTML file. Care of the above suggestion, keeping the styles in a separate CSS file would make sense.

[vkbo]

For the HTML/CSS stuff, you can turn on the "Disable styling" switch in the Build tool, and you get pure HTML which you can style as you wish. The unstyled file is intended for conversion tools, like for ebooks and such. The styled one is for importing into word processors, since they pretty much all can handle HTML imports. The HTML export is not really intended for publishing to a website or such, but as an intermediate format.

For the other suggestion, see the planned changes for 2.1 here: #1269. I think this is pretty much covered by existing planned changes.

[vkbo]

I should add that the end product of novelWriter is a manuscript, not a publishable product. I have deliberately kept the scope of novelWriter fairly narrow. This both helps to make it good at the things it is designed to do, and not overloaded with features for things that other tools do better. Hence, the editor is designed for fiction writing specifically (as opposed to being a general text editor) and the output is a manuscript instead of a host of formats with numerous specialised formatting options. There are already a ton of tools out there for that. I try to stick to fairly universal formats.

[Ostsol]

Fair enough. I could potentially write a custom converter from JSON.

[vkbo]

Yeah, that is the idea behind the JSON export. It can be loaded into a Python script with a couple of lines of code, so for those that are interested, you can do pretty much whatever you want.

I plan to make the build tool callable from the command line as well, so that for the programmers and scripters out there, you will be able to create your own build pipeline for all of these things directly from a build definition file and a project without having to enter the GUI. I would like that option myself.