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Telescopic Text
An open-source library to help with creating expandable text.
Inspired by StretchText and TelescopicText.
I've been thinking a lot about creating a browsable store of knowledge that provides something useful at all distance scales (e.g. viewing the entire library, just a subcategory, a single file, etc.) and concepts like Telescopic Text are a first step in creating more information scales than just a single document level.
This library is meant to be the start for anyone to create telescopic text, including those who are non-technical.
Creating a telescopic text
To create some telescopic text, you can use your favorite note-taking app or text editor that supports bullet lists and start by writing a full sentence or two in a starting bullet:
* Texts are boundless shapeshifters, zealous freedom fighters, sacred holders of space
At any point, you can break up the full sentence into separate lines. Bullets at the same indentation level are combined into the same sentence, and any indented bullets will be used as an expansion point for the parent bullet. By default, items on the same indentation level will be combined with a space , but you can pass in a custom separator into the parsing function.
* Texts
* Clear notes
* are boundless shapeshifters,
* are limitless shapeshifters,
* zealous freedom fighters, sacred holders of space
The above example would yield the following text: "Texts are boundless shapeshifters, zealous freedom fighters, sacred holders of space" where "Texts" is expandable into "Clear notes" and "are boundless shapeshifters" is expandable into "are limitless shapeshifters".
NOTE: the parsing logic is robust to different indentation levels, but for most compatible experience, you should normalize the indentations so that each nested bullet is differentiated by a standard set of spaces. We also currently only support *, -, and + bullet indicators.
Usage
Create some expandable text using the bullet list format shown above. You can then test out how your poem looks and feels and get a basic code snippet that recreates it using the test bed!
See the full instructions below:
You can load it directly via CDN as follows: Put this anywhere inside the head of your HTML file.
<head>
...
<script src="https://unpkg.com/telescopic-text/lib/index.js">script>
<link href="https://unpkg.com/telescopic-text/lib/index.css" rel="stylesheet">
head>
or if you prefer to do the manual way, you can include the lib/index.js and lib/index.css files in your project.
The package exports a function called createTelescopicTextFromBulletedList that parses a bulleted list and returns a HTMLNode with your telescopic text inside.
Basic usage may look something like this:
<head>
<script src="https://unpkg.com/telescopic-text/lib/index.js">script>
<link href="https://unpkg.com/telescopic-text/lib/index.css" rel="stylesheet">
head>
<body>
<div id="text-container">div>
<script>
const content = `
* I
* Yawning, I
* made tea`;
const node = createTelescopicTextFromBulletedList(content);
const container = document.getElementById("text-container");
container.appendChild(node);
script>
body>
You can check out a more detailed example in demo/index.html
Types
interface Content {
text: string // Original string content in the line
replacements: Line[] // Sections of the original text to replace/expand
}
interface Line {
og: string // the original string to replace
new: string // the replacement string
replacements: Line[] // nested replacements to apply on the resultant line afterwards
}
// Default function to create a new `
` node containing the
// telescoping text from bullet points
function createTelescopicTextFromBulletedList(content: string)
// This is the fundamental data structure for parsing native bullet lists into telescoping text.
interface NewContent {
text: string;
expansions?: NewContent[];
// This is always a space right now, but could be extended to use any
// separator between content.
separator?: string;
}
Future Work
- Supporting infinite expansion with
... - Concept of shapeshifting text in general... these are not always expansions.
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