My pet project, TypograFix, is about a year old (I could be wrong), and it seems that most issues regarding text transforms have been ironed out precisely to the extent where I can produce HTML that is perfect or near-perfect. Now that the bulk of the work is over, I’m thinking of adding some of the more exotic (and difficult to do) features, including:
Server-side image generation — This is a very vague objective but, at the very least, I should have the possibility to generate, e.g., a histogram or a nice heading just by typing text. It’s completely feasible, though of course this feature requires IsolatedStorage on the client side, and image hosting whenever the article is posted. This is annoying, because we would need to specify the URL or the target folder (i.e., in the app itself you’d have a field called Image Url which would contain something like http://nesteruk.org/images/, to which the filenames are appended.) One other potential feature is the generation of graphs and such.
Better code highlighting — seeing how one cannot use CSS on most publis resources, most syntax highlighting is done in very strange ways, using <blockquote>, <code> and <font> tags. Current customizations inside code blocks are already very rich, though, with support for colours, italic comments, and the like. But I think that more can be done: after all, we’re allowed to use the <img> tag in code, so perhaps we can somehow make text more readable? In actual fact, the current use of the <code> tag is dubious, because the tag offers no value when formatting. A new formatting script for code – if I ever bother to write one – will probably be written in F#.
Stylesheet management — this is important because, although I’ve added some spurious stylesheet-related tabs, it’s not very user-friendly. It would be better to have a manager that could habdle stylesheets and – possibly – even program settings in a way where one could switch from one site’s formatting rules to another’s. Once again, this is a fairly difficult thing to implement correctly.
Custom rules — if there’s anything I’ve learned while publishing online, it’s that ever website or blog system has its own set of mess-ups and blatant developer mistakes, and no matter how good TypograFix is, most systems have flaws that have to be havigated around by hand[1]. Some of these weird features have already made their way into the program – e.g., the option to add blank lines after <p> tags. Having it all in a more manageable fashion would be nice.
Fun with Unicode — there are lots of characters in the Unicode character set that can be abused to make all sorts of strange images and the like. For example, one can emulate Japanese list numbering by using Unicode characters, and then provide an option to repaginate lists using paragraphs prefixed by those glyphs. Actually, what would be good to start with is a fast, JavaScript-driven Unicode browser.
Smarter Cut & Paste — right now, HTML copied off a website gets pasted as plain-text. It would be nice if the program could interoperate with HTML and maybe even RTF/Word clipboard formats in order to preserve at least some typographic information about the data being pasted in. Also – and this would be really good – I think that Excel importing and pasting in Excel or CSV-formatted data should also be processed correctly.
Print production — seeing how TypograFix is good for preparing technical documentation, maybe there is a way to prepare text in a format best suited for importing into InDesign. Of course, text has to be imported without any styles, but at least we can preserve the basic structure (e.g., line breaks) so that it doesn’t have to be redone.
This is a very rough list, but I imagine that I will me making a start on some of these features pretty soon.
Notes
- ↑ The only exception from this rule is the BlogEngine.net blogging platform which I use.