2011-02-05

Novelang-Desktop

This is the result of a conversation with another Novelang user, coming with ideas for a better integration with the desktop environment.

First, as strange as it seems, Novelang is a desktop application. While it embeds a Web server it’s not meant to serve content to remote clients. The support of a Web client is just the fastest approach to give quick preview of files edited in a desktop-integrated text editor. (For serving Novelang documents on the World Wide Web, it’s much faster to generate them as static files first.)

By now the desktop integration relies on a java -jar Novelang-...jar typed in a command-line console. That’s a bit harsh.

The yet-to-develop Novelang-desktop project would be fancier. Novelang-desktop is a graphical application where user sets content roots and associated TCP ports. With this, editing or viewing Novelang documents from multiple content directories doesn’t require to start several JVMs anymore.

Here is a skeletal view of the main window of Novelang-desktop:

 ___________________________________________
|  __________________________               |
| | C:\projects\docs  | 8081 |  [ Add...  ] |
| | I:\shared\foo     | 8082 |  [ Edit... ] |
| |___________________|______|  [ Remove  ] |
|                                           |
| [?]                      [ Configure... ] |
|___________________________________________|

Double-clicking on a table line opens a Web browser with the directory listing of the content root.

The directory listing comes with great improvements. It shows every files, and each Novelang source file has several associated links:

  • Open in current Web browser (one link per rendition MIME type, like PDF, HTML, FO, XML).
  • Open in default editor.
  • Batch generation.

For the last two there is a trick: the link loops back to a special service of Novelang-desktop, which has all the powers to execute arbitrary code and scan local filesystem.

  • For editor opening it executes a pre-configured command with the file path as an argument.
  • For batch generation first it opens a dialog requesting target directory.

Novelang-desktop’s configuration goes in user’s home directory by default.

2011-02-04

Novelang-0.55.0 released!

Just released Novelang-0.55.0!

Summary of changes:

  • New --temporary-dir option. For better error messages, Novelang now buffers the whole document before sending it to the HTTP client. When the document is too big Novelang buffers it into a temporary file under this directory. If an error occurs then its not too late to send an HTTP redirection.
  • Fixed SVG embedding for PDF. Now the image appears as true vector image inside the PDF. Correct reference to the SVG resource implied adding a $content-directory parameter passed to XSL stylesheets.
  • Fixed loss of request parameters when issuing error page.
  • Less verbose logging of Logback configuration at startup.
  • Fixed various cases of bad problem reporting, where location in origin file was missing.
  • Plenty of other small fixes.

Download it from here.

Enjoy!