[Ohrrpgce] Text markup, again

[James Paige]

I have been thinking about this today.

There are pros and cons for different markup styles, but [color=10][/color]
with backcompat-optional bbcode markup would probably be most familiar to
people, and easiest to type. [img#.#] for images/sprites. [sp#] for
horizontal spacing

Any of the styles will actually be fine-- but if you need help breaking the
tie and settling on one, that is my 2 cents :)

---
James



On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 5:55 AM Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com> wrote:

> I want to finally expose the ability to use text markup and non-8x8 fonts
> to users. Even before all the menus and slice collections are updated, and
> before the textbox file format or any others are replaced. Therefore there
> will be graphical problems and shortcomings, but we need that in order to
> find and fix what needs fixing. It can be marked experimental.
>
> (I have a plan for textboxes: just repurpose the 304 bytes used to store
> the existing 8 lines of text as a single autowrapped 304 byte string, plus
> an extra 200 bytes or so tacked onto the end of each SAY record so there's
> plenty of spare space to actually use markup/compact fonts.)
>
> But this means we need to finalise the markup. I'm very undecided. Sorry,
> lots of waffle.
>
> Previously:
>
> On Friday, January 27, 2017, Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> On 28 January 2017 at 13:10, Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Also, I decided that it's best not to use ${...} codes for markup
>>> supported by printstr such as color and font. ${...} should be exclusively
>>> for inserting a string variable in the text, as in many programming
>>> languages. Instead I was thinking of using #{...}, or maybe quite different
>>> syntax which has (optional) closing tags, like $[col45]...$[/col], since
>>> closing tags really are needed (right now I'm using -1 to mean 'restore
>>> previous'). Other tag names could include colbg, pal, spc (no closing tag),
>>> font, indent, indentr, and even link=.
>>>
>>
>> Plus also no-argument $[b], $[i], $[h] tags, which switch to the
>> bold/italic/highlight font.
>> Actually, maybe we can just use [b], [col45], etc, or <b>, <col45>... and
>> add a backcompat bit to enable them, and use a $ prefix to escape them
>>
>
> Godot also uses bbcode:
> https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/gui/bbcode_in_richtextlabel.html#reference
>
> I like the idea of allowing both short and long forms of markup, eg both
> [c10] and [col10] and [color10], because there will be a lot of codes. But
> it makes parsing harder. So I'll just list long forms below.
>
> Options include:
> -#{color10} #{/color}
> -or some other variant like :{color10}, !{color10}.
> -[color=10] [/color]  or [color10]    (= is optional)
> -just [color=10] [/color]  (= is mandatory if there's an arg)
> -$[color10] $[/color]
> -<color10> </color>, or <color=10> </color>. Not quite XML.
> -RPG Maker uses \C[10] and a lot of other one-character backslash codes
> (see attachment) for other things like pauses.
>
> Two-argument tags are also required, for embedding image n frame m. E.g.
> <spr4,8>
>
> I already notice that I find it really easy to accidentally type ${i}
> instead of #{i}.
>
> Markup beginning with ! or with : has a problem: the ! or : is easily
> mistaken as part of the preceding text, eg "Gold:{C10} ${V2}"
>
> $ is used for string operators and embed codes, and I wanted the syntax
> $"Gold: ${gold}" to embed a local or global variable by name. so Using $
> neerd
>
> Note that the text renderer doesn't process markup that doesn't have a
> valid tag name or argument. So there's less backcompat risk
>
> Nonetheless If we were to use bbcode, a backcompat bit to disable it seems
> warranted. If we used anything else, like #{i} then I see no need for a
> bit. That would simplify a lot of code since we wouldn't need to pass the
> backcompat bit as "withtags" all over the codebase, which seems pretty
> horrible, and especially for text slices in slice collections. Should
> probably rule out bbcode just for this, unless the backcompat only affected
> textboxes (and maybe plotstrings) and nothing else. That's probably already
> good enough to avoid all backcompat problems. I guess I should run
> rpgbatch.py to extract textboxes and other strings and see what I find.
>
> bbcode or <color10> are easiest to type. That's important.
>
> bbcode or angle brackets may be a nuiscance on forums, wikis, or help
> pages.
>
> And then I also want to support mediawiki markup, for help pages. That
> would be an optional per-slice setting, available to users too. But
> mediawiki isn't a popular markup. Markdown is. Honestly if easy typing is a
> concern, optional markdown seems like the ultimate solution for
> italics/bold/underline/strikethrough/indent. This comparison of markup
> languages is interesting:
> http://hyperpolyglot.org/lightweight-markup#text-style
>
> And then there's the tag names to use.
> [i] should mean italic, but I also wanted i for icon. Hmm, ico or icon.
> And img for sprites... or spr? spr is probably too similar to spc, for
> horizontal space (in pixels). I suppose s would be strike-through not space
> or sprite?
>
>
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