Changelog

1.1.0 — 2026-10-16

• DocViewMD is now Dawn Doc, from Bit Direction Ltd; its website is dawndoc.com.
• A new look from the Dawn Doc brand: a new app icon (a sun rising over three lines of words, on a night-blue tile), a Markdown document icon for .md, .markdown, .mdown and .mkd files on macOS and Windows, the brand's warm paper, ink and sunrise-orange colours throughout the interface in light and dark, and its fonts: Figtree for the interface, Outfit for its headings and JetBrains Mono for the source editor. The empty window and the Licence pane show the Dawn Doc mark. Documents keep their themes' fonts and colours, and exports are unchanged.
• Dawn Doc is now paid software with a free 30-day trial that starts on first launch; the status bar counts it down ("Trial: 12 days left", highlighted in the last 7 days) and reads "Licensed" once a licence is added, and clicking it opens the Licence pane. If the computer's clock is set back by more than a day, the trial keeps counting from the latest date it has seen and the status bar says the clock looks wrong.
• When the trial ends, Dawn Doc is read-only until you add a licence: a banner with Buy Dawn Doc and Enter licence… buttons says so, and drafts already on disk stay there for when a licence is added. Opening, viewing, searching, copying, printing and Settings keep working; editing, saving, creating, renaming, moving or trashing files, saving templates, adding images and exporting do not.
• Settings has a new Licence pane: activate online by entering your licence key, or offline by entering the pane's request code at dawndoc.com/activate on any device with a browser and importing the licence file you get back (or pasting its text). Deactivate this device frees one of the licence's 3 devices.
• After the trial has ended, Deactivate this device first asks you to save or close documents with unsaved changes, since Dawn Doc is read-only afterwards and couldn't save them. The Licence pane also says when the licence saved on this computer was activated on another one.
• Help has Enter Licence… and Buy Dawn Doc…, and About shows the licence state.
• Network: Dawn Doc sends data only when you activate or deactivate a licence: the licence key, a hash of the device's ID, a device name (editable; it defaults to the computer's name), the platform and the app version. Apart from that, the only network traffic is loading the web images a document links to (as any Markdown viewer does). It works offline otherwise.
• The packaged app turns on Electron's fuses: it can no longer be started as plain Node, ignores NODE_OPTIONS and the --inspect flags, loads its code only from its app archive, and (macOS and Windows) checks that archive's integrity. CI reads the fuses back from the unpacked app.
• macOS: once Bit Direction's Apple Developer ID exists, CI signs and notarises the macOS builds. Until then they stay ad-hoc signed and not notarised, as in 1.0.x (dawndoc.com/download has the first-launch steps).
• Help → About opens the End User Licence Agreement and the third-party notices, and every installer ships both files.
• Dawn Doc is now Bit Direction Ltd's software under a commercial licence, the End User Licence Agreement.
• The app's identifier changed from com.docviewmd.app to com.bitdirection.dawndoc and its data folder is now named Dawn Doc, so Dawn Doc starts with default settings and does not read 1.0.x's settings, sessions, drafts, templates or themes (they stay in the old DocViewMD folder). The frontmatter keys are now dawndoc.theme, dawndoc.export, dawndoc.assets and dawndoc.template; a 1.0.x document's docviewmd.* keys show as ordinary frontmatter and are no longer applied. DocViewMD 1.0.x is a separate app and stays installed until you remove it. On Windows, Dawn Doc installs into a folder of its own with its own Apps & features entry, so either app can be uninstalled without removing the other; both register .md, .markdown, .mdown and .mkd under the same file type, though, and uninstalling either one takes the other's link to those files with it, so uninstall DocViewMD 1.0.x before installing Dawn Doc (or run the Dawn Doc installer again afterwards). On macOS the "Open With" defaults reset and macOS asks you to allow the first launch again. On Linux the deb is now dawndoc, so remove the docviewmd package yourself; the AppImage needs its new AppArmor profile, dawndoc-appimage (dawndoc.com/download has it).
• Known: a file with mixed line endings is saved with a single line ending throughout.

1.0.1 — 2026-10-15

• A file you open at launch (double-click or Open With) opens in your default mode and is the active tab, not the one the last session had open: the window counts as ready only once the file is open. On macOS, a file opened from Finder while DocViewMD has no window brings up a window with it.
• A folder open in the sidebar catches up with files added, deleted or renamed while it was being read; before, such a change stayed out of the tree until the next change on disk.
• A folder with more than 20,000 entries follows DocViewMD's own rename and Move to Trash, and keeps its "Showing the first 20,000 items" notice when it grows past that while it opens.
• PDF export: a tall image or Mermaid diagram is scaled to fit a page, so it no longer leaves the heading before it alone at the bottom of a page or cuts off the rest of the document. Long lines of code wrap instead of being cut at the page edge, and a pagination that stops before the end of the document falls back to the plain PDF, with its warning, instead of silently dropping the rest.
• Spell check on Linux and Windows no longer downloads a dictionary from Google's servers: a US English dictionary ships with the app (macOS uses its own spell checker).
• The Linux AppImage no longer forces Chromium's sandbox off on every distribution. Where Ubuntu 24.04 and later stops it, it runs without the sandbox and says so when it starts (Continue or Quit, with Don't show this again); dawndoc.com/download has an AppArmor profile that gives the AppImage its sandbox back, and the deb installs its own.
• Controls hand the cursor back to the document after a mouse click: the page size, theme and other ribbon selects (a letter typed afterwards no longer changes the setting), Search, Recent, the theme links and the status bar's buttons. A ribbon command such as Bold or Undo acts on the document even when you used the Find bar a moment before; closing Find (Esc or ×) returns the cursor to the document, and so do Enter and Esc in the Header and Footer fields.
• The editor you switch to takes the cursor after you click a document tab, open or create a document, close a tab or change the mode, so you can type at once.
• Undo and Redo in the ribbon work in Split view, where they did nothing.
• Opening the Export tab keeps the document's undo history and the cursor where it was (the editor used to be rebuilt, so Undo did nothing afterwards), and a fixed ribbon tab you click while a Table, Image, Code or Math tab is showing stays selected instead of bouncing back.
• Bold and Italic on a bare cursor show as pressed in the ribbon at once, not only after the cursor moves.

1.0.0 — 2026-10-11

• An app icon of its own on every platform, and installers that CI will build from a version tag: dmg and zip for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, a Windows installer, and an AppImage and a deb for Linux. They have no code-signing certificate, and the tag attaches them to a draft GitHub release.
• The macOS apps are ad-hoc signed (no certificate, not notarised). Their signature is valid, so macOS asks you to allow the first launch once (System Settings → Privacy & Security; dawndoc.com/download has the steps) instead of calling the Apple Silicon app damaged.
• The macOS DMG builds on a machine whose project is in a shared folder: DV_DIST_DIR writes the packages to a local disk, because the DMG tool cannot read the app's framework links from a shared folder.
• An untouched save keeps every byte in more files: links around bold or italic text, <img> tags whose address contains width=, and blank lines at the start or end of a file now survive. 100 of 100 real READMEs from installed packages come back byte-identical, up from 72.
• A first document needs no workaround: ribbon buttons and tabs keep the cursor in the document, dialogs hand it back, and a new table puts the cursor in its first cell. A new end-to-end test builds one (heading, bold text, bulleted list, image, table), saves it and exports a PDF with page numbers.
• A key pressed right after the cursor moved acts on the new selection (End then Enter no longer deletes the selected word), and so does a shortcut such as Paste as Plain Text. Typing right after Enter in a list stays in order.
• PDF export keeps its contents page numbers and footers for a README that starts with an image-only heading or has headings that start with a digit (most changelogs). A heading stays with a code block taller than a page, and a code block taller than a page no longer loses its tail or its line breaks.
• Quitting right after typing in a visual document asks to save that typing instead of losing it. A confirmed quit with unsaved documents now also quits on macOS, and it keeps the open tabs for the next launch. A tab opened just before quitting is restored too.
• Context-menu submenus open from the keyboard (→ or Enter) and close back to their item (← or Esc).
• Save dialogs and new linked notes use the platform's path separator (Windows), the symlink tests skip only where symlinks cannot be made, and files check out with LF line endings everywhere.
• On Windows, the folders inside an open folder, and the folders of open documents, can be renamed and deleted while DocViewMD has them open (in Explorer or in the app); before, the file watchers held them.
• On macOS, a folder in the sidebar renamed only by case (notes to Notes) no longer leaves its old subfolders behind in the tree.
• The "+" block handle stays in the margin beside its paragraph. In a smaller window it could land on the text, over a wiki link, and take the click meant for the link.
• Package size (NFR6) is now measured: app.asar ≤ 30 MB, English-only locales, and the installed and download sizes of each build are recorded. The old "under 200 MB installed" goal cannot be met with Electron 44 and is amended in the specification.
• Opening a 1 MB file in under a second (NFR1) is verified only with doubled budgets: it measured 1.3 s on a VM without GPU compositing. The normal-budget check on a machine with a working GPU is still to do.

0.5.0 — 2026-10-11

• A Settings window (General, Editor, Markdown, Files & Images, Themes, Export, Keyboard Shortcuts) where every change applies at once and each pane can restore its defaults.
• Keyboard shortcuts handled from one keymap and editable with a recorder that catches conflicts. They show in menus, ribbon tooltips, the palette and context menus.
• Editor zoom (⌘+ / ⌘− / ⌘0), line spacing, and F6 to move between the ribbon, sidebar, editor and status bar.
• An accessibility pass checked by axe-core (no serious or critical findings), with 4.5:1 contrast in every built-in theme.
• Faster large files, a performance harness and a size gate (npm run size).

0.4.0 — 2026-10-10

• A folder sidebar with a live file tree (new, rename, move to Trash) and an outline: click a heading to jump, or drag it to move its section.
• A command palette for commands, files, recent files and headings.
• Templates (built-in and your own), focus mode, wiki links ([[Note]], [[Note#Heading]]) and a status bar with the cursor position.

0.3.0 — 2026-09-05

• Five document themes (GitHub, Academic, Book, Slate, Minimal) in light and dark, plus your own themes with live reload.
• Export to paginated PDF (cover page, contents with page numbers, headers and footers), Word and standalone HTML, and Print, with a paginated preview.
• Split view with a themed, scroll-synced preview; highlighted code, math and Mermaid diagrams.

0.2.0 — 2026-09-05

• A visual editor with a Word-like ribbon, contextual tabs, right-click and slash menus and a floating toolbar.
• Tables, images (embedded or in an assets folder), callouts, math, Mermaid, footnotes, find and replace, a frontmatter panel and spell check.
• Unchanged blocks keep their original Markdown bytes, and a round-trip check guards every save.

0.1.0 — 2026-09-04

• The app shell: tabs, safe (atomic) saves, autosaved drafts with crash recovery, session restore and detection of changes on disk.
• Source mode, and a CommonMark and GitHub-flavoured Markdown parser and serializer that round-trip both specifications' examples (three known exceptions each).
• File associations and launch handling for macOS, Windows and Linux (the launch handling was checked on macOS); light and dark window chrome.