Poof v1.2.0 Release Notes

Poof v1.2.0 is here (already). This version ties up some loose ends in the re-implemented PDF export feature.

Note: If you’re having trouble with updating, grab the new link from the poof documentation. I’ve updated the link there to always, always grab the latest stable version.

You now have options (configurable by the poof.config special passage) to control some basic styles of the generated PDF. First, you can select from one of three basic fonts: a serif option (Georgia), a sans-serif option (Roboto), and a monospace option (Consolas). Because the PDF export process requires fonts to be loaded as base-64 data into a “virtual file system”, the best I can do is provide basic options. Having three inoffensive options from the main font categories seemed like the wisest choice. Users can now also specify font sizes, the options are very small, small, normal, large, and very large. Normal is 12-point, very small is 8-point and very large is 16-point. The final option given is one for line height (or line spacing, if you prefer). You can set this option to a value between 1 and 2, with 1 being single-spaced and 2 being double-spaced. The defaul line height is 1.15.

The style options provided above are all the low-hanging fruit I could manage. Since the new implementation generates a PDF on the fly from the HTML data, rather than generating a canvas image from the same, the styling options are fairly limited; it’s not as simple as recreating what appears on the screen anymore. In other words, we lost line numbers but gained copy/paste. And I’m alright with that. The simpler structure should be nicer for printers anyway. As always, though, if you want more, let me know and I’ll see if it’s at least possible.

In addition, a the loading screen is now called when a PDF generates. For short projects, you’ll see nothing at all, maybe a flash. For lengthier projects, the process can take several seconds or more, and messing with the filtering or sorting during this process is probably unwise, so I decided to lock out the screen completely instead of risking that happening. It shouldn’t take more than fifteen or so seconds to generate the PDF, even in novel-length projects, but the speed of the operation will vary from machine to machine and browser to browser.

In future releases:

Poof is going back on my maintenance shelf for now. I’m pleased with the new PDF implementation as it’s been a net positive all across the format, and getting the Twee encoder to respect filter and sort was something I was happy to knock out along the way. But other than those things, I don’t think there’s much more that needs to be done here.

I’ll be on the lookout for bugs, problems, and feature requests, as always.

In a future version made by someone smarter than me:

I jest, but I’ve been asked about implementing a “play order” sorting method. While this is theoretically possible, the only real way to do it would be to load up the story format engine in question, crawl the file somehow, and then interpret that order in a way that could be meaningfully sorted. I’m open to ideas, but I don’t believe this is possible–even parsing just the markup links in each passage to construct a rough order would be expensive performance-wise and time-consuming to implement. Not to mention that it wouldn’t really return a reliable play order. It’s an interesting problem, but I can’t think of a solution, outside using passage naming conventions, like numbers, in the first place.