Zettlr 4.0 released

Zettlr 4.0 has been released and, as promised, brings with it a number of important changes. Here are the ones you need to know about:

• Table editor. While previously, users were plagued by data loss issues and other behaviours, all these issues have been fixed in improved table editor.
• New image and PDF file viewer. This allows you to preview images and PDF files from within Zettlr. You can turn this on in settings, and stay in the app to view images or PDF files.
• Improved citation parser. Now you get a better visual indication of how the citations will be parsed before you finish the citation. This makes it easier than ever to write the correct syntax and properly cite what you are referencing. It includes support for Pandoc-crossref.
• Onboarding. Zettlr now ships with a new onboarding screen. When you start the app for the first time, it now prompts you to adjust some central settings, saving you time searching for these options in the preferences.
• Link and footnote insertion workflows have been reworked. You can now insert new links and footnotes more easily and with fewer clicks or key presses. They have also rewritten Zettlr’s FSAL, which means that it now detects changes on your computer, mitigating a lot of issues users had before.
• Lua interface. They have also exposed the Lua filter interface, which means that you can now customise your exports even further. This allows for a better customisation experience and the developers hope it will kick off a community movement to share filters with one another.

The documentation has undergone a complete overhaul, with features better described and easier to find.

My one gripe is that there’s still no way to control the editor width to make text easier to read and more comfortable to write, other, that is, than opening the right-hand sidebar.

Zettlr is free and open-source software and available as a download for macOS and Windows.