Underline Text Formatting

Bike Outliner
1

Hi!

I’m brand new to Bike Outliner; really like it and will definitely purchase a subscription. However, I do have a question: I tested the text formatting shortcuts with Cmd+E, and think it is a great implementation but I noticed that Underline is missing as an option. This is unfortunate because in my work I use a lot of strikethrough/underline formatting to indicate new and deleted text.

I imagine this is a know limitation of the software or file formatting?

Thanks, and great work on the outliner! It is very elegant.

Best,

MB

2

Perhaps worth distinguishing between structure and decoration here.

Bike defines a set of standard HTML text run attributes {em, strong, code, mark, s, a, base} and custom style sheets can map these onto particular decorations.

In decorative terms,

  • em is typically displayed with an italic style,
  • strong with bold,
  • mark with highlight.

u is not included in that set – it has an uncertain status these days – but customising a style-sheet would allow you to repurpose mark, for example, if your aim is specifically to see an underline text decoration (no longer the normal purpose of <u> tags in HTML).

(As you’ve discovered, the s attribute is displayed by default as strikethrough)

If your workflow moves bike drafts on for further processing in a system which expects to see <u> tags to indicate new text, then a command line filter like:

jaq --from xml --to xml 'walk(
    if type == "object" and .t == "mark" then
        .t = "u"
    else
        .
    end
)' input.bike > output.html

would replace the <mark> tags with <u> tags.

jaq can be installed via Homebrew

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