January 29, 2007
MarkBernstein.org
 

Let's stretch

Nate Matias's Tinderbox Stretchtext Writing System is terrific and has lots of features. But how might we use stretchtext in everyday hypertexts, like this one?

Let's make a Tinderbox macro. For example, I often like to quote things like this:

‘TERENCE, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.

When I'm writing, I don’t want to worry about formatting — and over the years, the way formatting works keeps changing. So, I just use a Tinderbox macro

^do(quote,'Terence, this is stupid stuff...')

and the macro remembers whether we're using <blockquote> or <div class="quotation"> or whatever, this year.

So, how might stretchtext work? I think we’ll want three arguments:

So, we'll say