Dream big: your ideal composition / typesetting software

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  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,584
    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: 15
    edited June 2025
    @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: 144
    @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: 15
    Not something I could take on at the moment but would love to chat. Will DM email.
  • Joshua Langman
    Joshua Langman Posts: 144
    Better, more traditionally typographic, tools for setting tables. Software that treats tables more like columns of text rather than using a spreadsheet paradigm. A feature to specify gutters between table columns (as opposed to "cell" insets or using empty columns for this purpose). More flexibility in regards to cell boundaries — e.g., the ability to specify something like "Allow text in column A to extend horizontally into the space of column B, unless the corresponding cell in column B contains text." "Do such-and-such, unless it would cause a collision." Letterpress printers used to fudge the boundaries like this as necessary. Software in the 21st century can't do it.
  • Joshua Langman
    Joshua Langman Posts: 144
    The ability to define various baseline grids and select from the options on a page-by-page basis. Generally, a more flexible approach to baseline grids.

    The ability to lock an object or a point on a frame to a guide, so that when the guide moves, the object follows. Could also work in reverse: when a text frame is resized, the guides that are locked to its sides move with them, pulling along in turn whatever other objects are locked to those guides.
  • Joshua Langman
    Joshua Langman Posts: 144
    edited October 12
    Paragraph style sheets that can include contextually responsive behavior: if this paragraph is preceded by a paragraph of style X, do this; if followed by Y, do this. E.g., if preceded by any style defined as a subhead, remove the indent. Many uses for facilitating the interaction of prose pars with extracts, lists, etc., as well as the behavior of stacked heads.

    Edit: I see I mentioned this early on, but the explanation here is perhaps clearer.
  • Joshua Langman
    Joshua Langman Posts: 144
    A system for specifying exceptions to title-casing or sentence-casing and including these rules in paragraph and character styles.

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