I understand that there are those in the TaskPaper community who are fiercely protective of TaskPaper remaining as it is without using styles or graphics in TaskPaper. I completely respect that and I am offering the following suggestion only as one users opinion for his own workflow. I do not wish to stir a debate, but only to humbly offer an opinion here.
I believe that Jessie uses a library or a code structure from which he designs TaskPaper. I don’t have enough information about that to know for certain if what I am about to suggest is doable or not but, here it goes …
I would like to suggest that more styles could be applied to a TaskPaper document, by adding additional tag systems to a future version of TaskPaper. That is to say, instead of the one tag system that TaskPaper now uses (marking all tags starting with the character “@”), two more tag systems could be added (for example marking tags that start with the characters “#”, and “&”.
The reason that I am offering such a suggestion is because, I find my primary use of TaskPaper is as an organization tool that is particularly useful as a writing instrument. I use it to keep track of the many parts of a very long and complex (legal) document. Saving searches with tags is very helpful. I also have some basic tags for adding bold, italics, and bolded italics, to any paragraph using the .less file.
I was wondering if any sort of GREP logic is available to Jessie when he is writing from his code base when he creates future versions of TaskPaper? I don’t know what code library he is using so I don’t know if what I am going to suggest is possible. If so, I was thinking that, suppose there was a kind of tag that only affected everything to the left of it until it came to a space? This would allow a tag to affect a word within a paragraph and to bold, color, italicize, or underline that word. Naturally you don’t want to use an existing tag to do this which is why I was suggesting adding a different tag trigger.
You could also offer a tag that affected all the information to the left of it until it hit a period or a return character. This would allow for styling to be applied to only a line in the midst of a paragraph.
If GREP parameters could be used and if you could set a tag to the parameters I have suggested, you might also have a preference setting for custom tags which the user would specify to their own preferred GREP parameters (beginning of a sentence, return character, etc.)
I understand that eventually I am going to have to port my project to a word processor environment. I offer this suggestion here for TaskPaper as it is very challenging to review what I have to write and compare it with what I have already written - looking for brevity, avoiding repetition, and seeking better clarity with constant revisions. Because of this, when using TaskPaper as a draft writing mode - as I am organizing my ideas, I would find it very useful if I could color or bold a word in the middle of a paragraph that would be otherwise unaffected.
This would be very helpful to me as I scan what I have written for key words or terms.