Tome, the Guildhall content editor

Tome is essentially a content management system. It uses conventions matching those of PmWiki but was not built from PmWiki's source code. Besides the fact that the two target very different output models, PmWiki is written in php and uses styles and conventions that are not a good fit for living within the Guildhall project. PmWiki is an excellent system, just not a good starting point for Tome.

Tome functions as a browser, allowing content to be created and displayed. It also functions as a back end web server, storing and retrieving files locally. Recently it acquired a new capability to generate html, specifically the markup for the website you are currently browsing, including this very page.

Next Steps

The exercise of producing html markup from Tome's PmWiki-like markup revealed a number of deficiencies. In particular, PmWiki's approach to dealing with styles applied to sections, blocks, and spans feels clumsy. Yes, it's good to have an easier way to specify style than what html uses, but it feels to me that Tome's internal markup could be more definitive about which structural elements a style specification is targeting. PmWiki limits its markup to 7-bit ascii characters. I feel no such constraint. Since I won't be running on Windows any time soon, and since I think I can coerce a FreeBSD system to honor Mac keyboard conventions, I have made use of readily available Unicode characters to denote style changes:

• Implement subscript and superscript ( {^superscript^} and {_subscript_} )
• Implement an escape mechanism so when the styles above are activated this page will still work
• Write a converter between svg and Guildhall's vector graphics data type so that scalable vector graphics can be freely used in Tome and html markup

Notes

Details about PmWiki can be found at pmwiki.org.