Typographer

[Mike Rockett]

TextformatterTypographer

A ProcessWire wrapper for the awesome PHP Typography class, originally authored by KINGdesk LLC and enhanced by Peter Putzer in wp-Typography. Like Smartypants, it supercharges text fields with enhanced typography and typesetting, such as smart quotations, hyphenation in 59 languages, ellipses, copyright-, trade-, and service-marks, math symbols, and more.

It's based on the PHP-Typography library found over at wp-Typography, which is more frequently updated and feature rich that its original by KINGdesk LLC.

The module itself is fully configurable. I haven't done extensive testing, but there is nothing complex about this, and so I only envisage a typographical bug here and there, if any.

[Mike Rockett]

Edit: Feature has been removed. See next post.

Bumped to 0.1.1 and added styles():

<?= $modules->get('TextformatterTypographer')->styles(); ?>

Outputs the following default style-set:

span.caps{font-size:96%}
span.numbers{font-size:96%}
span.dquo{margin-left:-.41em}
span.squo{margin-left:-.06em}

To configure this, add a config array as the first parameter. For caps and numbers, Typographer will detect if you're specifying a string or integer-based value and name the property accordingly:

<?= $modules->get('TextformatterTypographer')->styles([
	'caps' => 'Charter SC', // some fonts don't render well when their font-size is changed, so using a small caps font is better.
	'numbers' => 'Charter SC',
	'dquo' => '-.29em', // depends on your font
]); ?>

This outputs the following:

span.caps{font-family:'Charter SC'}
span.numbers{font-family:'Charter SC'}
span.dquo{margin-left:-.29em}
span.squo{margin-left:-.06em}

Or, you could well use your own stylesheet.

Also, I haven't done anything about ampersands. Not many people style those, and so there's no sensible default.

(GitHub)

[Mike Rockett]

Bumped to 0.2.0-beta:

• Switch from the old PHP Typography library to the newer, more frequently updated library found at wp-Typography. This adds several features that are now being used in the module. Some features are not working correctly for me, and so I have excluded them. Soon, I'll do a complete tear-down to see what works and what doesn't.
• Config no longer allows the textformatter to be disabled. If you want to turn it off, rather remove it from your field.
• Config no longer allows to reset to defaults. A different implementation of this may be added in the future, if deemed required.
• Stylesheet is no longer provided as a function for the purposes of not being opinionated. There is, however, a stylesheet in the module's directory, which can be used as a basis for your main stylesheet.
• You will also notice that the stylesheet references new classes. Due to the fact that this fork of PHP-Typography uses hanging punctuation, new classes have been added. However, they retained the original naming for single and double initial quotes. As this is a new module for PW, I thought it sensible to change these names. All the new class names are in the stylesheet, and also in the Typographer subclass.

[Mike Rockett]

Important: The behind-the-scenes library can be quite resource heavy. As mentioned in the module's configuration, it's highly recommended that you cache your templates or use ProCache. Users of the WordPress plugin are also advised to use Super Cache, and so there's not much I can do about this.

[Mike Rockett]

In light of the above, I've been working on a port of Typset from JS to PHP: https://github.com/mikerockett/php-typeset

 

 

It doesn't include hyphenation, but does add features not found in the original JS version. It's currently in alpha, and I'll make a Textformatter for it when it's stable.

I haven't done benchmarking between Typography and Typeset, but I can already feel that Typeset is faster.

Sensible (common) defaults are set.

If you're keen to have a look, please let me know what you think.

?

[Mike Rockett]

So the current maintainer of wp-Typography and I have been having a discussion about performance, and I've since done some benchmarking. It appears that Typeset is actually slower, but it is due to two modules: small caps and hanging punctuation. These two modules appear to be very resource intensive. I think Typeset felt faster because they were being used in different contexts - one with ProcessWire and one without (Typeset doesn't have a text-formatter yet).

If you're interested, here's the discussion (benchmarks included).

[Mike Rockett]

In response to Teppo's Weekly #139:

Thanks for the features; much appreciated! For the most part, web typography is kinda new to me. I've noticed in the past, but never really thought much about it (most people don't). So playing around with all of this is quite interesting. There is still much for me to learn in terms of best practice, and I want to see where Typeset can be improved. Whilst I really like PHP Typography (specifically the fork of it found in wp-Typography), I'd like to be able to use Typeset as a daily driver once performance has been improved as much as possible.

Also, just a note about the typography textformatter: it's only slow when hyphenation is enabled; that appears to be the case from experiencing the difference on my blog. Nonetheless, it's always recommended to cache your output for better performance. No amount of performance-improvements to the modules will save the time that caching will.

[Macrura]

Just wanted to stop by here and say thanks for this module, I'm hoping to use it on a lot of sites, once I can work out how to fix the possible issue described below...

I have 2 projects that i was using it on, and for me it was working fine on all my browsers, 5-6 laptops and 2 desktops; the snafu that I ran into was that users on some Safari versions, both on iPad and desktop were reporting google fonts looking garbled and corrupted.

I did a lot of troubleshooting, without really considering that this textformatter could be the culprit, but having just got off the phone with a Safari 9.1.3 user, they confirmed that the google fonts appeared all fixed and the problem solved once i removed the textformatter...

If you want me to report this on Github, i can do that, just wanted to post here, in case anyone else runs into this problem (and it is probably only seen by that minority of users who are using Safari, on a specific OS X, possibly 10.9.5); it does work and look fine on Chrome and Firefox...

[Mike Rockett]

@Macrura - Thanks for bringing it up. Interesting that the fonts would look garbled - could you perhaps post a screenie of what that looks like? That aside, it's more than likely something I can't solve as it's unrelated to the textformatter itself, and more related to PHP Typography. However, I can't see how it would cause text to be garbled, so a screenie would help loads.

[Macrura]

Yes thanks - didn't mean to imply that the module would be able to solve this... here is an example screenshot:

 

[Mike Rockett]

6 hours ago, Macrura said:

didn't mean to imply that the module would be able to solve this...

Sure, but one never knows - I would have liked it to. ;-)

So that seems really odd. At first I thought it was the diacritics feature, but those mangled words don't have any diacritic alternates. It could perhaps by hyphenation, but my gut tells me it's not very likely. Nonetheless, try turning that off by removing the language code from the hyphenation field in config. Failing which, perhaps me seeing the compiled source code would help - I could then investigate myself or discuss with the author. Also, what font is that? Raleway?

[Macrura]

the problem here is that i can't reproduce this issue, it was reported to me by some people who sent me screenshots; so i can't get source code, and i can't really test it, until i can find a mac running exactly the same OS and Safari version;

those same users said the problem didn't occur on Firefox; and the one user who i had on the phone told me the problem immediately fixed itself when i removed that textformatter...

it is possible i may have had something mis-configured with the language code or that removing that would also have fixed it.

Font is Raleway...

I will probably have to setup a local install next week in order to test the language code setting (both these sites are live now)...

[Mike Rockett]

Thanks for the update - yeah, I figured it wouldn't have been easy to get the source. Anyways, I have opened up an issue over at wp-Typography (PHP Typography is maintained within that extension for WordPress). Hopefully we can find the culprit soon.

[Mike Rockett]

@Macrura - Can I get links to the sites in question?

[Macrura]

actually i was wrong about the source code - that is all cached by pro cache, so it would be the same for everyone, unless the generated source under Safari was somehow different based on some set of conditions; i did test it with various ways of loading the google fonts (regular script tag, webfont loader etc, and those didn't seem to make any difference).

One of the sites will be live tomorrow, the other is here: https://www.chestnutridgetennis.com/

thanks - and sorry for incoherence, getting late here in NY.

[Mike Rockett]

@Macrura - thanks, and no stress. Will see what I can find in the meantime.

As a side note, there is also Typeset, which I ported over from Typeset.js. However, there are a few bugs relating to the HTML parser, so there won't be a textformatter until such time as those are all ironed out.

[Mike Rockett]

I totally should have reviewed the FAQ:

Quote

There is a bug in the shipped Safari 9 that results in strange characters being rendered when both ligatures and soft hyphens appear on the same line. (The bug is only triggered when the font actually supports ligatures, e.g. with Open Sans.)

Fortunately, adding the following line to your CSS fixes the font rendering and preserves ligatures:

1 2	-webkit-font-feature-settings: "liga"; font-feature-settings: "liga";

 

[Macrura]

wow that is awesome, the Safari mystery is solved!

[Mike Rockett]

Typographer will be getting an update soon. Functionally, everything should stay the same. PHP Typography is now available on Composer, and so I'd like to make use of it that way, considering its dependencies are also loaded in via Composer.

Haven't actually reviewed for any breaking changes in PHP Typography, but I don't think there would be many, if any at all...Once done, I think it'll be safe for me to bump to stable.

[Mike Rockett]

Bumped to 0.3.0 - now using the Composer package, as above. There don't appear to be any breaking changes, other that the fact that the Settings class is now a separate entity. Also note that I'm keeping this in alpha for the simple reason that things may change. I don't expect to break anything, but would like to re-work the configuration class a little, add a few more features, and then bump to stable 1.0.0.

[Mike Rockett]

Bumped to 0.4.0 Beta

[netcarver]

@Mike Rockett I like the use of release and the changelog - please keep it up. In fact, I think I need to adopt this with my own modules going forward. 

It would be really nice if ProcessUpgrades - or the PW core - could send us to a module's release notes before we decided to update it.

[Mike Rockett]

1 hour ago, netcarver said:

I like the use of release and the changelog - please keep it up. In fact, I think I need to adopt this with my own modules going forward. 

Thanks - I'm moving closer to a standardised approach. Deciding on whether to bump versions in a separate commit or not... Guess that really depends on what I'm doing, but most of the time the aim is to have one commit per release as there is no dev branch. (I might land up moving all my modules over to fetching from a release tag instead of master. I don't like the concept of multiple branches for dev/master, in the ProcessWire context. that is.)

1 hour ago, netcarver said:

It would be really nice if ProcessUpgrades - or the PW core - could send us to a module's release notes before we decided to update it.

Indeed - this has been brought up before, and I do like the idea. However, we'd need a standardised changelog format to include in our repositories. It could also be managed in a JSON fashion:

{
    "changelog": {
        "1.0.0": [
            "Log 1",
            "Log 2",
            "Log 3",
            "etc.",
        ],
        "0.9.9": [array]
    }
}

 

[netcarver]

48 minutes ago, Mike Rockett said:

However, we'd need a standardised changelog format to include in our repositories. It could also be managed in a JSON fashion:

It could be as simple as having an offsite link to the github release page for the version. I believe it could be auto-generated, as they all (currently) follow the same format...

https://github.com/<user>/<project>/releases/tag/<upgrade-version>
===================================
                 |
Known to PW from the module repository?

Updated to add: Yes, just trying the locally and it seems to work. Not difficult to pull the repo URL along with the other data and use it to add a "Changes" link next the new version. A little more use of WireHttp() requests to check if the links are sending back a 200 or 404 page and we'll know which items have release tags.

[Mike Rockett]

37 minutes ago, netcarver said:

It could be as simple as having an offsite link to the github release page for the version. I believe it could be auto-generated, as they all (currently) follow the same format...

Sure, though module developers would need to be aware, in the same context as a standardised format, that proper release notes should go in there. It's a good idea.