Preview of text formatting

[anisus]

Issue

When typing formatted text in the console, such as a pose or a say message, the text formatting should be previewed directly while typing the command in the console.

See these Wolfery Forum discussions: https://forum.wolfery.com/t/feature-suggestion-preview-of-bold-cursive-etc/1623/3 https://forum.wolfery.com/t/change-of-colour-ic-vs-ooc/2157

Notes

• The formatting should be for inline formatting like **bold**, _italics_, ((ooc)) and similar.
• The formatting should preferably indicate if the message is ooc: :>types an ooc pose
• In the console, all typed characters should show (Eg. when typing **bold**, the asterisks should show in the console, even if they won't appear in the chat log after being sent.)

[xetem]

I've been looking into this one today. May not be a quick implementation, but I think I'm on the right track. I think right now I just need to figure out how to detect and assign new tokens to format, trying to do it in a similar manner to how the spellchecking extension works.

I've started over here on this branch if anyone's interested in taking a look.

[anisus]

@xetem Neat! I checked your branch, and I think that is a good first step, to enable Codemirror to add those decorations. Now (if I understand your addition correctly), it will be about either expanding TextStep to have the option of emitting those tokens (bold, italics, ooc, etc.) based on our formatting rules (as "defined" in formatText.js).

Or maybe instead of expanding TextStep, to create a similar FormatTextStep.

But I can understand if the parser system can feel a bit complex.

[anisus]

I've been looking closer into this. It seems we will run into an issue with the current parser, as it only does line-by-line parsing. The problem is that some formatting, like _italics_ is allowed to span over multiple lines:

_this text
will also be written with italics_

But in order for the parser to know that "this text" should be in italics, the parser needs to check if there is a matching end _ on some other line. And... we can't do that now.

I see a couple of options:

~~Instead of using StreamParser, writing our own custom parser as suggested in this CodeMirror topic: https://discuss.codemirror.net/t/writing-a-custom-parser-without-using-lezer-or-streamparser/4692~~

Another option is to rid ourselves with CodeMirror overall. Not sure how viable that is though.

I think it might be possible with Decorations.

[anisus]

Sorry if I highjacked your suggested idea! I ended up implementing it, based on your initial idea of using Decorations. However, to get it to work properly, I had to do it quite differently, and hooking it into the formatText.js function, so that it follows the same formatting rules as when displayed.

... and formatText.js is a bit of a mess (but I tried to tidy it up slightly while I was at it). But still, the feature is now complete thanks to you! :)

[xetem]

No worries here 😁 I too was actually looking into hooking into formatText.js, but tried doing so without changing anything about it and hit a wall. 😅