More power of text formatting

[hmslima]

Manuskript is great program and I hope a lot to use it in the future, but there are things that keep me stuck in LibreOffice.

1 - Manuskript needs a more powerful markup language, Markdown is painfully limited. Personally I would be satisfied with a Markdown-like language with the native possibility of text align (maybe an enhanced Markdown!), kludges like using HTML code for very basic things within my text formatted with Markdown is not the ideal. If it's possible to make an own markup language (who knows one day we have the Manuskript language?) with the Markdown or Asciidoc syntax and having all formatting possibilities of HTML, it would be perfect.

2 - Possibility to manage something like a CSS style sheet file for formating all my texts – I mean an universal file containing all the formatation that will be useful when compiling my work to .pdf, .html, .odt, etc – like border size, indentation of the first line of the paragraph, fonts, background color, background image, etc.

Manuskript already has the possibility to replace some texts in the compilation, I use a lot en dashes as quotation dashes, fortunatelly I can convert -- to – in the Compile settings. Manuskript needs more things like this.

[gedakc]

Thanks @hmslima for the words of appreciation and for creating this issue based on the discussion started on the manuskript web site.

First let me begin with the statement that if LibreOffice provides all the features you need, then please feel free to continue to use LibreOffice. We believe LibreOffice fills a different and often complimentary need.

With Manuskript one of our main goals is to permit an author to focus on content and not be overly concerned about format. If/when complex formatting is required then we suggest that this be performed after the author has created the initial content. Manuskript supports such a work-flow by enabling export to a number of different formats whereupon an author can use a more applicable tool to more precisely control formatting.

For example if you wish to create a novel and publish it as an eBook, then you might consider another tool I wrote called EBookGenTools which works in tandem with Manuskript and provides simple formatting such as centered asterisks to denote scene and POV changes.

Now onto your questions:

A1) Manuskript is designed to accept any text content, not just Markdown. The program includes a highlighter for Markdown, with the intention of providing support for other highlighters in the future. The initial formatting of a document is provided in the compile/export step with support for most formats being provided by pandoc.

Currently there is no plan create a new markdown language which is a huge undertaking. Instead we strive to support markdown-style languages that already exist.

A2) Support for CSS has been requested in issue #227.

A3) Which text replacements would you like to see in manuksript? Please provide specific examples.

Thanks again for your suggestions for improving Manuskript.

[hmslima]

Thanks for answering.

With Manuskript one of our main goals is to permit an author to focus on content and not be overly concerned about format

I understand, we can leave for pos-production all the global formatting, like border size, font of most text, background color, book cover, etc. But when we talk about local formattings, it's good to have control upon them from beginning, if I leave the centering of texts for later to be made in another program I may have a huge headache. I can give some exemples of writers that like to stylise their text to give more dinamic to the history (not my case!):

1. In order to show that the voice of the character is different, it's writen with a stylised font, the rest of the text is managed by the global formatting
2. I am writing a investigative history and sometimes I show some documents with tables inside the book
3. In order to show that the voice is getting lower I show the font of the words getting smaller.

I am not a programmer, but I imagine that making a text processor is very difficult. But I will be sincere, for me the perfect program would be the combination of the tools of Manuskript (I mean the organization tools where I can write about the world, characters, etc and compiler) and the most basic resources of a text processor. Markup languages like Markdown and Asciidoc are interesting and I imagine they are useful for most people, but I think that a WYSIWYG text processor would give me much more safety.

I don't expect to entirely build my book exclusively using Manuskript, even with LibreOffice it's not a good idea. But I would love to have the local formattings done in the program I am writing for then worry about the global formatting that I can do in another program.

A2) Support for CSS has been requested in issue #227.

That's great! The first line of my paragraphs always are indented, for Manuskript I need something like a stylesheet to manage the formatation of my paragraphs.

A3) Which text replacements would you like to see in manuksript? Please provide specific examples

Ups, I was not clear, I didn't mean exactly replacements, but other useful tools like stylesheet support.

[gedakc]

Markup languages like Markdown and Asciidoc are interesting and I imagine they are useful for most people, but I think that a WYSIWYG text processor would give me much more safety.

There are no plans or intentions of making Manuskript into a WYSIWYG editor.

Manuskript supports the entry of text, and is not intended to be WYSIWYG. The text can be plain text, markdown, or some other markup language. For instance if you wish to write in HTML then that is supported by manuskript. Currently only one text highlighter exists and that is for markdown.

I would love to have the local formattings done in the program I am writing for then worry about the global formatting that I can do in another program.

If you seek extensive formatting capabilities, then you might investigate using TeX for your writing endeavours.

EDIT - additional suggestions

If you would like to try to use just Markdown:

Tables can be entered as follows:

Input

| title | description
| ----- | ----- |
| first | some text about first |
| second | some text about the second item |

Output

title	description
first	some text about first
second	some text about the second item

See also Markdown Cheatsheet

[ProtoformX]

Hello, I'd like to second the motion. But my requests are more narrow in definition.

I'd like basic features for italicising and bolding.

I do see that A) You can do both in manuskript, but it is not cross-format compatible. B) I'm only asking for italics and bolding. Not multiple fonts or page breaks.

[obw]

go to Menu -> Edit ->Format -> Italic OR Menu -> Edit ->Format -> bold

Or use ctrl-i OR ctrl-b

enclosed by ** == Bold enclosed by * == italic

[zpartakov]

Hi

I've just discovered and tester Manuskript, quite interesting. But I have a problem in some way similar to the one of @hmslima :

1. for my writings, I'm not using OpenOffice or LibreOffice (good tools but quite bad for real writing) but, after a few years using LaTeX, now asciidoc, with a simple editor (atom) and the syntax is quite different from the one of Markdown. Wouldn't it be possible to select in the doc options between different markdown syntaxes, eg. simple markdown (as now), asciidoc, dokuwiki (which I use with other authors in collaborative writings) etc.? Or at least to may export to asciidoc, as I think pandoc may do it ?

it's not very easy for me leaving asciidoc because I have a set of bash scripts creating pdf, odt, html and epub with a lot of work behind that will be tricky to adapt (see also following question)

2. I'm using git with all my files to backup and see the progression; they are all plain *.adoc (it also means I may bash some things, eg. making automatic replacements with sed); it seems with Manuskript there is only a .msk file, which is not editable if not by Manuskript

The problem 1 is not critical, as I may learn to write in plain markdown and use pandoc (if the conversion works well) to convert to asciidoc.

The problem 2, however, is rather critical, because I really need to have my documents gitted and in plain text. If it is possible to bash or pythonize Manuskript to script such exports / imports, please give me a clue...

And once again, thank you for the great job!

[olivierkes]

Hi Fred,

Regarding problem 2, manuskript was created with git in mind, see https://www.theologeek.ch/manuskript/2016/03/31/open-plain-text-file-format/

Regarding problem one, using pandoc to convert to asciidoc is the best option right now.

[Reaper10]

@hmslima i have found #753 for Text Alignment.

[kwoot]

Hi. Just found Manuskript and it is promising. I like to approach it has to writing. I see it supports pandoc but while pandoc can convert to asciidoc, that exporter is not mentioned in the snap. Can I add it myself somehow?

[AlanDunaway]

Hi. Just found Manuskript and it is promising. I like to approach it has to writing. I see it supports pandoc but while pandoc can convert to asciidoc, that exporter is not mentioned in the snap. Can I add it myself somehow?

Pandoc doesn't benefit of the transformation menu in Manuskript.

[netalex]

i think the easyest option could be borrow a modular syntax higlighter \ previewer from like the vscode extensions world to support vitually any microformatting convention. I love the idea that the editor would remain linked to formatting meanings and not preserntation.

[obw]

vscode is mostly written in JavaScript and TypeScript all the Syntax highlighting configuration are stored in JSON-Files an JS-Syntax for the expressions!

I think, which would be easier to use the KatePart-Component (Kwrite/Kate Editor from KDE) or use direct the highlight definitions: https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kate/katepart/highlight.html#katehighlight-xml-format

here is for example the XML for Marksown: https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/syntax-highlighting/-/blob/master/data/syntax/markdown.xml

More than 300 others are there too, perhaps there is a python Lib which can use these files?

regards