Dream big: your ideal composition / typesetting software

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  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,475
    Thanks for explaining! I hope Marc Foley may be interested to tilt his development towards the needs of book developers like this :)
  • theorosendorf
    theorosendorf Posts: 14
    edited June 16
    @Joshua Langman So many great ideas in this thread. I've been designing and building apps and systems for decades, and one thing I’ve learned is that lack of features is often the best way to proceed. Otherwise you may never reach a usable product.
    That said, I read through these ideas and want them all.
    Maybe the answer is to build the minimally useful app, and leave the rest to plugins?
    I bring this up because maybe 3/4 of the startups I worked with that failed did so by trying to do everything at once. They overreached, obsessed over edge cases, took on too much tech debt, and overleveraged their funding. Not saying you would do this but it’s also an idea that people seem to easily forget once they start building.
    If you do pursue this, I’d love to be included in the beta.
  • Joshua Langman
    Joshua Langman Posts: 130
    @Theo Rosendorf — let's talk! I have no skills to build this on my own, but would love to collaborate.

    Continuing, as ideas occur to me:

    Ladder/river control: A way to program in instructions like "in case of the same word starting or ending x consecutive lines, do such and such" or "in case of a river of x or more lines, defined as stacked spaces within x proximity to each other, do whatever."

    (I think many elementary typography texts make too big a deal of rivers; in practice, they often don't bother me unless they're egregious. But given that so many people seem to be so vigilant about them, it's odd that the software isn't.)
  • theorosendorf
    theorosendorf Posts: 14
    Not something I could take on at the moment but would love to chat. Will DM email.

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