module Annotations: a no-regex textformatter your clients can actually edit

[Mikel]

Hi everyone,

a client of ours had a term that shows up all over their site, and they had it registered internationally. So suddenly it needed an ® after every occurrence. The question landed in our inbox as "you probably know an easy way to do this, right?" 😉

There is already Ryan's TextformatterFindReplace, which is powerful and the right tool if you are happy writing regex. We needed something different: a textformatter our clients can edit themselves, i.e. people who do not write regular expressions. So in Annotations you just list the strings and pick options in a small per-string table, no regex anywhere. And so clients never have to touch the Modules section, the module also adds its own page under Setup, guarded by a dedicated annotations-edit permission, where they manage exactly these settings and nothing else.
  
What it can do, for example:

• Append a mark, the classic case: put (R) (or ©, ™, ...) after a term wherever it appears.
• Wrap a part of a word, e.g. turn H2O into H₂O (subscript the 2).
• Auto-style certain terms, e.g. make a brand name bold everywhere.
• Footnote markers, mark only the first occurrence of a term (first-only), great for footnotes¹.

The real work, though, is in the details that make it safe to hand to an editor:

• It only changes text, never markup. Tags and their attributes (href, alt, title, class), HTML comments, and the content of skip-tags you configure (code, pre, script, style) are left completely alone. A brand name sitting in a URL or an alt text stays untouched.
• E-mail addresses are protected. With a frameless to ® rule, info@frameless.at does not turn into info@frameless®.at.
• It never doubles a mark. It recognises a symbol that is already there, whether it was typed as the literal character (®), as an entity (®, ®,
•   ®, ®, lower or upper case, even with leading zeros), or already wrapped in a tag. No second one gets added.
• It normalises messy input to your setting. Same spelling, consistent form: a bare symbol gets wrapped, an existing wrapper gets unwrapped (or re-wrapped) if you change the tag later. Editors can be inconsistent and the output still comes out uniform.
• Longest match wins, and rules compose. Configure both "frameless" and "frameless Media" and each keeps its own treatment. Append runs first, wrap layers on top, so "frameless Media" can be bolded on the word and still get its ® at the end: frameless Media®, while a single "frameless" gets rendered as frameless®.
• Per-string control: whole-word matching (so cat does not hit category), case sensitivity, and first-occurrence-only, each set per string.
• Any inline wrap tag: sub, sup, b, strong, em, mark, abbr and more, not just superscript.

Get it here
https://github.com/frameless-at/TextformatterAnnotations

Feedback and ideas welcome.
Cheers, Mike!