Dashset

Javascript typesetter.

What it does

• Split rich text into lines, i.e.:
• Input: paragraph node containing typesettable nodes (e.g. text/images)
• Every node is typeset, i.e. it figures out its own width and height
  • Images will not be fetched, imageWidth and imageHeight must be set manually, and the paragraph may have to be typeset again once loaded
• The paragraph node splits the string of nodes into lines, adding hyphens to hyphenated words if necessary
• Output: paragraph lines that contain nodes (the same ones, but may also contain extra spacers or such, so don't expect indices to match)

Why it does

• Splitting rich text into pages is tedious and/or hard

What it doesn't do

• Parse HTML and output typesettable nodes
• Guarantee 100% clean typesetting (e.g. “world” may be split into lines as “world, ”, creating a dangling punctuation mark on the next line; lines may be slightly over the allowed width)
• Output HTML
• Fancy stuff like floats or non-rectangular text shapes

Example

const dashset = window.dashset // (or require('path/to/dashset'))

let context = new dashset.Context({
  width: 50,                // page width in pixels
  fontFamily: 'sans-serif', // CSS font family
  fontSize: 13              // font size in pixels
})

// create a paragraph
let paragraph = new dashset.ParagraphNode(context)

// add text nodes, each containing atomic strings of text
paragraph.append(new dashset.TextNode(context, { content: 'This' }))
// exceptStart: this will be hidden if it's at the beginning of a line
paragraph.append(new dashset.TextNode(context, { content: ' ', exceptStart: true }))
paragraph.append(new dashset.TextNode(context, { content: 'is' }))
paragraph.append(new dashset.TextNode(context, { content: ' ', exceptStart: true }))
// a hyphen can be appended to this syllable:
paragraph.append(new dashset.TextNode(context, { content: 'hy', hyphen: true }))
paragraph.append(new dashset.TextNode(context, { content: 'phen', hyphen: true }))
paragraph.append(new dashset.TextNode(context, { content: 'a', hyphen: true }))
paragraph.append(new dashset.TextNode(context, { content: 'ted' }))
paragraph.append(new dashset.TextNode(context, { content: ' ', exceptStart: true }))
paragraph.append(new dashset.TextNode(context, { content: 'text.' }))

// typeset the paragraph.
// This part requires a document, able to create a CanvasRenderingContext2D.
// If there is no document, each character will be 1em wide.
// If there is a custom measurer, however, it will use that one for measuring
// character widths instead (dashset.measureText.setCustomMeasurer)
paragraph.typeset()

// paragraph.lines now contains an array of `Line`s
const exampleParagraph = document.createElement('div')
for (const line of paragraph.lines) {
  const lineElement = document.createElement('div')
  for (const item of line.content) {
    if (item.type === 'spacer') {
      // spacers are whitespace with `width` and `height`
      const spacer = document.createElement('span')
      spacer.style.display = 'inline-block'
      spacer.style.width = `${item.width}px`
      spacer.style.height = `${item.height}px`
      lineElement.append(spacer)
    } else if (item.type === 'text') {
      // text is just text, possibly with styles
      const text = document.createElement('span')
      // (there'd probably be code here applying the text styles)
      text.textContent = item.content
      if (item.hyphenEnabled) {
        // the hyphen is visible!
        text.textContent += '-'
      }
      lineElement.append(text)
    }
  }
  exampleParagraph.append(lineElement)
}

document.body.append(exampleParagraph)