[spijdar]

> (And that's assuming they're not doing something like, well, what NovelWriter does, saving individual chapters and perhaps even individual scenes as independent files.)

This is totally unrelated to the gist of this thread, but I just wanted to point out that novelWriter's project builder outputs to a single file, which can be markdown, ODF, PDF, HTML, and others. Pandoc could then make a single DOCX file out of that.

Your point still stands that this is too complicated for the average user, but I just wanted to mention this since it might make a difference for technically minded writers considering novelWriter.

[chipotle_coyote]

That makes sense (I figured novelWriter did that, since it looks an awful lot like an attempt at a Markdown-based answer to Scrivener and that's how Scrivener's "Compile" function works), and I suspect it won't be too difficult for novelWriter to add other file formats to its exporter. So not being able to output DOCX is probably not a long-term issue, unless the maintainers have a philosophical objection to it. :)