Maggot: More Adventures

"6) An bug/ feature/ item of interest! If you comment out stuff that doesn't work in the template files, it may still fail U's validation, presumably because the validation doesn't have any understanding of the structure of the document but knows it's going have to swap {{invalid expression}}, and can't find anything to swap it with. Boy - it took me over an hour to get that one!"

Yes, the validator just scans all placeholders in the template files regardless of whether it's inside a comment or not.That is because the template engine has no notion of comments. Nothing is skipped during validation, even though the placeholder might not be replaced during export at all.

"As a workaround, Götz has proposed accessing the notes programmatically, and putting my image there; but I couldn't get that to work. "document.notes" seems to be valid - it will display something like (,,,) where the number of commas equals the number of notes, but it seems that document.notes can't be taken over a FOR loop. So for now we'll just have to put the image in from the U document in the normal way."

I will have a look into that. You should definitely be able to access your Notes in a convenient way when writing your own Templates.

"11) \n in localised.strings doesn't work... just replaced by one white space, presumably because HTML is getting its hands on it as well. It's not really important, I guess."

I just realized that \n just inserts a line break in the text file, which doesn't mean a line break is inserted in the formatted HTML. Instead, you can use <br /> in the strings file and you should get a line break.

"12) I've been trying to get the navigation bar to list the h1 headings in the current page. I used storeAs in the .plist file, and I thought all would be well, but the validation failed, saying it didn't recognise "headings". I used:
storeAs headings in the plist
{{FOR heading IN headings}} in the template.
Any idea?"

Currently, you can use the storeAs attributed only for Reference Actions (footnotes, references, etc.) and not for Paragraph Styles (I'm assuming the Style for h1 headings is a Paragraph Style). storeAs attributes for Paragraph Styles is definitely on our TODO list for the Web Export.

Götz

It appears that project notes are ignored by the current HTML exporter. Since links are encoded in notes, it would be ideal to create project notes for frequently used links on a site, such as internal links, rather than having to duplicate them for each document within the project.

Could this little feature be incorporated into the next update?

aef110:

"1. Option to replace smart quotes with straight quotes. It's great to use smart quotes when writing, and there's an option to replace straight quotes with smart quotes. However, HTML often needs the reverse and it would be great to have this capability."

Good idea, I think this will be included in the next beta!

"2. Replace all nonstandard characters (i.e., those not in ASCII 0-127) with official HTML entity codes. Thus, è would be replaced by &egrave; and ü by &uuml;, etc. This would eliminate much post-export editing and allow all characters to work in all browsers."

We did not include this capability because we set the encoding of the exported XHTML files to Unicode, thus eliminating the need for replacing characters with their HTML entities (except &, <, >). We will think about such an option.

Goetz

Incidentally, does any HTML maven here know how some web pages seem to remember where you are on them, so that if you follow a link and then click the back arrow, it takes you back to the same position on the page you were at?

That's a browser feature, I think.

From what i read in this tread the exporter seems to me like a latin dictonary, i dont even dare to press the export button..

I modified XHTML.plist in the Snippet template folder as follows:

I changed the "floating" key under "inline" -> "Item 5" (Image) from:

<div><img src="{{image.path}}" alt="{{description}}" /><p class="imgTitle">{{LOC image}} {{@index}}: {{description}}</p></div>

... to:

<img src="{{image.path}}" alt="{{description}}" class="center">

At this point, my edit worked as planned.

When I then changed the "image.path" variable from:

images/{{document.name}}/{{key}}

... to:

image-files/{{key}}

... in order to conform to my website, the exporter reverted back to the original.

Can anyone explain why? Is this a feature designed to prevent users from modifying the default templates too much? Do I need to create my own template in another folder?


Many thanks,

Albert

Hi Goetz,

Thanks very much. I just closed and restarted Ulysses and it now works as expected.

Only one issue: How can I get rid of the "<p>Image 1</p>" tags before each image? Also, is there a way to remove the extra new line (\n) after each image?


Many thanks,

Albert

Only one issue: How can I get rid of the <p>Image 1</p> tags before each image?

Simply remove <p class="imgTitle">{{LOC image}} {{@index}}: {{description}}</p> in the property "floating" and you should be fine. This way, only <div><img ... /></div> is inserted.

Also, is there a way to remove the extra new line (\n) after each image?

Do you mean the newline after the closing </div>? This newline is inserted automatically after each paragraph (and the floating element, i.e. the image and the description enlocsed by the <div> is part of the paragraph). The WebExport inserts a newline after each paragraph to make the source code more readable.