Novelang-0.23.0 released!

Latest release of Novelang available here. This version brings named URL (called "external-link"). See documentation for details.

Wiki Creole grammar

Finally I’ve found a Wiki grammar for ANTLR: http://www.riehle.org/2008/01/09/an-ebnf-grammar-for-wiki-creole-10

That’s interesting to compare with Novelang’s one.

— Paragraphs are the same central thing.

— Rule names embed rendering-oriented meaning (like text_boldcontent).

— Some rules embed their own terminator (a list may end by a end_of_list).

— Some predicates look like hand-coded lookahead:

{ input.LA(1) != STAR || (input.LA(1) == STAR && input.LA(2) == STAR) }?

This grammar is just a skeleton, it doesn’t produce an AST tree or whatever.

Novelang-0.22.0 released!

Latest release of Novelang available here. This version brings various fixes related to images. See documentation for details.

SVG support

I knew it, I knew it… SVG support cannot be seamless, at least not at the first try. First I thought that Safari beta 4 was not SVG-enabled but it appears that it displays whole SVG files (with .svg extension in the URL). And, when embedded in a <object> tag, SVG may work, too, as shown here:

http://labs.silverorange.com/archive/2006/january/howtoinclude

So why are Novelang-generated pages not displaying embedded SVG? I noticed that everytime I refreshed the page, Safari downloaded the .svg file. Could that be something about the MIME type? For the page above, Safari’s Web Inspector tells that Content-Type is text/xml. For the Novelang-generated page, there is no Content-Type. I should fix that first.

Camino (same rendering engine as Firefox) understands SVG well, but adds some ugly scrollbars. They disappear when the size is set manually (maybe adding a few pixels). Adding image size will require some SVG parsing, the same way raster images are loaded by the Part to get their true size.

Aside of this, the article on silverorange.com gives a nice trick for replacing SVG by a raster image: just embed the reference to the raster image inside the <object> element. So when Novelang is requested a non-existing .png file, it could try to locate the same file but with a .svg extension and return the rasterized image. As a consequence, the batch mode should anticipate this and produce .png files for all .svg ones.

Yes, the Web server is something to be invented again and again.

Novelang-0.21.0 released!

Latest release of Novelang available here.

This version introduces support for raster and vector images. The source document references them through a path which can be either relative (from the document itself) or absolute (from the project root). And, yes, images may show inside table cells! Otherwise they must appear outside of paragraphs. Suported formats are .jpg, .png, .gif, .svg. SVG may or may not be rendered in HTML pages, depending on Web browser capability.

See documentation for details.