Shortening links?

[mylevelbest]

@NickSloan

I think I am coming from very much the same place as mylevelbest: I love the simplicity of TaskPaper, the folding, the tags, the searches and the way that everything is explicitly defined in text, and I love the fine-grained control that editable less stylesheets give, but I miss ad hoc styles (bold, italic etc). TP gives you an unsurpassed way of gathering information and slicing and dicing it in many different ways, but it does not let you articulate the text on the page in the optimum way to be readily digestible. Links, the subject of this thread, are perhaps the best example. There have been several instances where I would like to have used TP but have had to use something else instead because of the clumsiness of long links. (Relative links are a very partial and imperfect solution.)

Yes, as I have recently discovered - again, some people feel very strongly about a plain text environment. I still don’t get the whole markdown thing, but many are very serious about it. What TaskPaper can do, and that it happens to be in a plain text environment, are two very separate capabilities. It is similar to apples and oranges, where one has nothing to do with the other.

When Jessie recently suggested this could get resolved in a still quite distant version of TaskPaper it gave me some hope.

@jessegrosjean

The design with be that the editor is rich text, but when you save the file it will be saved as plain text. The rich text spans will be saved using Markdown formatting.

I’m pretty sure this will happen in TaskPaper 4. But I’m pretty sure that’s still a long way off. In the meantime I’m working to make the same system work for WriteRoom 4 which I’m working on now. In the meantime you could use Markdown formatting in your Taskpaper document to (for example) bold text. Then later whenever TaskPaper 4 comes around that formatting will appear as bold text. Instead of just plain text surrounded by **'s.

I too enjoy using bold, italics and hyperlinks occasionally and other modern “normal” type styling elements in my writing. It isn’t that it has to be there all the time, but it does help in the preparation of the story. To me writing in plain text that cannot be styled, but only prepared for later consumption, is like cooking a great meal in a cramped kitchen with inadequate pots, pans and cooking utensils. Well yes, you might say, I can’t really see what I am doing, but after all, the proof is in the eating of the meal. The proof is in the pudding is another way of saying this. Similar to my cooking and eating of the meal example, we could also say of the writing process, so long as when the results get viewed they look great, why does it matter to style text while you are writing it? Who cares if you are working in a small kitchen with no fuss and no frills or, who cares if you are writing in a plain text environment with code that will show the presentation well - when the work is finally consumed?

For some of us who also enjoy preparing the meal, it is also a pleasant thing to work in a well ordered environment so that we can see the structure in our cooking - our writing, as it unfolds. When we write we like to use the text flourishes using a bullet point or a bolded word in a paragraph. It is more fun to cook in a well laid out and spacious kitchen with good equipment. A good meal can be the result either way. As it is with my cooking example, with writing, some of us enjoy the environment that we write in - when we write, as much as we enjoy the results of having written.

It sounds like Jesse is on board at least in principle with this idea. It sounds like he has already found a solution which would keep everyone happy which would be a great thing. It also sounds like he is no where close to this in his workflow or that he has offered a solid commitment to it. But, there is hope at least.