While Yannis and Christos have been in San Francisco they worked on a number of features that will appear in the soon-to-be-released Editoria 1.1
The two standout features include:
- automagic book builder
- diacritics interface
The automagic book builder built primarily by Yannis enables a user to populate the structure of a book automatically from a directory of MS Word files. Essentially, from the book builder component the user can click ‘upload word files’ and a system dialog opens. They can navigate to a folder on their computer and select the files they wish to use to create the book. Editoria then sends all these files to INK to convert to HTML, creates the structure of the book, and populates all the chapters and parts with the right content. At this moment it ‘knows’ which MS Word file is in the front/body/back matter and whether it is a part or a chapter by the file name. We will add a config so the rules regarding what a file is called and where in the book it lands can be determined per publisher or (perhaps) per user.
This feature means that a production editor can simply ‘point’ Editoria at a directory of MS Word files, which is what they are used to working with, and without doing anything else other than press ‘upload’ the book will be built for them in the correct structure (assuming they named everything right). It’s a lot less work than uploading every file individually.
The second feature is a Diacritics interface for the editor. This rather nicely made by Christos so that you can have per-publisher assigned special characters categorised and listed in a simple interface (opened from the editor). That is in itself interesting as it might lend itself to other options like a special character ‘favorites’ list etc…but two other elements add some elegance to the implementation, the first is a simple checkbox that will determine if you leave the Diatrics dialog open or if it closes automatically once a character is placed. The second is that the user can search through the Diacritics with key words. For example you could type ‘dash’ to get a list of all the dash characters (m-dash etc), or typing ‘turned g’ would give you the result: ᵷ
We observed that copy editors search Wikipedia for the special characters they want. Now they can search within the editor interface, using the naming conventions they are used.
The Diacritics feature is, of course, a wax-editor component….which is used as the editor in Editoria. We are working a lot on Wax and it will become a substantial product in its own right.