It has been about half a year and we are ready with a new release. Fidus Writer 3.8 continues to bring a number of new features.

Try Fidus Writer 3.8 out on FidusWriter.com or install it as a snap on your own Linux computer. And let us know in our forum what you think about it.

The main new features can be found below:

• Copyright info: An editor for copyright and license information (per document and per media item).
• Cross references: Cross references are similar to internal links, but their textual content is always the same as the heading or figure caption they are referencing. They are updated if heading or figure they are linking to are updated.
• Save copy with different template: It is now possible to save a document and have the copy use another document template. For example, if one has different templates for different journals, one can copy an article that was originally written for the template of Journal A to instead work with the template of Journal B.
• Find and replace: There is a new find and replace dialog that can work around tracked changes. It ignores all text that is marked as to be deleted.
• Mobile mode: Fidus Writer is meant for serious academic writing, and the main device to do that will probably continue to be the laptop and not something people generally do on their tablet, phone or watch. However, we do realize that many users want to do quick corrections and editors on their phone. So Fidus Writer 3.8 is now able to handle users with small screen devices.
• Improved offline capabilities: Fidus Writer is not yet a real offline application. However, for a while we have permitted users to go offline temporarily while they continue to work on their document. If they reconnected while no others had edited the document in the meantime, or there were just a few edits, we even tried to incorporate these into the document. Fidus Writer 3.8 has much improved abilities in this area. It now is able to merge changes a user has made while being offline no matter how many changes other writers have made to the document in the meantime. If there have been several changes by several users, it will simply mark the edits of the user who comes back online as “tracked changes” when merging them in, and warning for that user to look at his/her own changes again in light of changes other users have made to the document meanwhile.

See the full change log here.

Focus on stability

While this release still features a number of new features, we are starting to see a shift toward more time being spent on increased stability rather than new features. Fidus Writer 3.8 has finally reached 90% test coverage for the main application and there are tests for all the plugins as well.

This should translate into less time being spent on fixing around release time and more long-term stability for end users.