Add character styling (ie. intra-paragraph styles)

[tmaslen]

Hello NYT devs,

Why does this limitation appear in AI2HTML...

The script currently only sets one style per paragraph, so custom styled words or characters within a paragraph are ignored. Each paragraph’s style is determined by the middle character in the paragraph.

Thanks, /t

[archietse]

At the start of this project I was trying to get something working quickly which meant just looping through all the text elements by paragraph with the intention of going back at some point and parsing by character. But paragraph styling ended up meeting 99 percent of our needs, and it was more pressing to add other features. Also the pressure to go back to character styling became less urgent once we realized we could just add html tags (ie. <b>, <i> and <span>'s and such) right into the text blocks to style text within paragraphs as needed (it's not pretty, but it works).

That said, I do want to add intra-paragraph styling at some point. Some of the goals/issues will be:

• Making sure that the html markup is as efficient as possible.
• Consolidating character styles so there are no duplicate definitions.
• Making the character style definition only be the differences from the its parent paragraph style.

[mbloch]

ai2html-beta.js includes support for character styling. This feature will be added to ai2html.js for release v0.64.