Monthly Archives: April 2013

Footnotes, Headers, and Footers

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Among the features I’ve had the most requests for are the ability to add footnotes to documents, as well as custom page headers and footers. These are standard features of print-oriented word processors and many people naturally expect to find them in UX Write. So I thought I’d give an outline of my plans for supporting these. There’s some rather tricky issues involved due to the web-oriented nature of the app, but fortunately these are solvable.

WebKit for editing

UX Write actually doesn’t do any layout itself; it is entirely dependent on the WebKit rendering engine, as used in Safari and Chrome, for displaying all content. WebKit is based on HTML and CSS, the document structure and formatting languages of the web, which work somewhat differently to the file formats used by print-oriented word processors such as Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer. The differences — in particular, HTML’s continuous, non-paginated nature — have important implications for the feature set that is possible to support in UX Write.

Writing a (sufficiently capable) custom layout engine is a task that takes a sizeable team of people and many years of effort, which simply wasn’t a viable option for this app. Relying on WebKit makes it possible to invest all development resources entirely on editing capabilities, rather than all of the logic to calculate where each piece of text goes and how it’s formatted. This is why UX Write possesses so many more features than its competitors — all the hard work of layout is already taken care of. WebKit is also built in to iOS, which makes it a very convenient choice for use in an iPhone/iPad word processor.

By using WebKit, UX Write inherits both the capabilities and limitations of HTML. Although HTML has a lot of great features — styles, tables, images, lists, hyperlinks, and a ton of formatting options — it’s not particularly good at paginated, print-based output. On the web, there’s no notion of a document being divided into a series of (virtual or real) sheets of paper like in a traditional pure-WYSIWYG word processor. I’ve previously discussed why relying on explicit pagination during editing doesn’t make sense in the context of writing for e-books or the web, but it is relevant for documents that are ultimately destined for print output only. Unfortunately, among the features HTML lacks are — you guessed it — footnotes, headers, and footers.

Currently, UX Write uses WebKit for both editing and print/PDF output — but there’s some changes on the way for the latter.

LaTeX for printing

WebKit isn’t the only layout engine out there of course. Another popular one is Donald Knuth’s famous TeX typesetting engine, which was designed in the early 1980s for high-quality presentation of scientific and mathematical publications. It was later used by Leslie Lamport as the basis for LaTeX, a high-level set of macros for structuring documents that are ultimately typeset by TeX to produce printed output. I’ve used LaTeX for producing all of my academic publications (though doing my writing in LyX, a graphical front-end), and it’s pretty much the de-facto standard for academic publishing in computer science, mathematics, physics, and other scientific fields. After being around for more than 25 years, LaTeX is still regarded as one of the best quality typesetting engines out there.

LaTeX provides excellent support for print-oriented features such as footnotes, headers, and footers, plus many others such as page-number references and embedding of hyperlinks and outline navigation elements in PDF files. It’s a much better option than WebKit for generating print output, and making use of it in UX Write will make it possible to provide these features.

There’s one major problem with LaTeX however — it is only able to run in batch mode, and cannot provide real-time updates to the typeset document during editing, as WebKit can. What batch mode means is that a document is supplied to LaTeX, it goes away and does its thing, and then a few seconds later you get back a PDF file with the output. This means that it can only realistically be used for printing or exporting PDF files, and leaves us with WebKit as the only viable option for actual editing.

It’s always been a goal of mine to have built-in LaTeX support in UX Write. My hopes were initially dashed after I read about the immense difficulties the developers of Texpad had encountered while attempting a port to iOS due to the complexity of the codebase, however they eventually achieved success with a much simpler LaTeX distribution than that which is typically used on desktop systems. Upon learning of this I realised two things — that it is viable to do, and that I should work with them.

So LaTeX provides the solution to the problem of producing high-quality print output with all the layout features typically expected. However because getting this integration working is quite an involved task, I’m going to be doing it in two separate stages:

Stage 1 (soon): External typesetting

Initially, UX Write will provide an option to export the current document as a .tex file, which can either be converted to a PDF directly on your iPad or iPhone using Texpad, or on your desktop system using an existing LaTeX distribution such as TeX Live.

Installing and using LaTeX on a desktop system requires a fair bit of technical proficiency, and is something I only recommend for advanced users who are already familiar with the process. Texpad is a much easier solution, as it’s just as easy to install as any other iOS app, and will integrate seamlessly with UX Write. I’ve been working with the Texpad developers over the past couple of months on getting this integration working, and we’re getting fairly close to having it available.

Stage 2 (later): Built-in typesetting

Eventually, UX Write will contain a built-in version of LaTeX that it will run directly when you print or export to PDF. Everything will be done within the app, without requiring any third-party software, and it will be just as seamless and easy to use as the current print/PDF option. You won’t even realise there’s anything special going on behind the scenes.

Given that Texpad provides a very good solution to the problem, I’m going to be leaving this second stage until much later on, and focus on other features like find & replace, spell checking, EPUB support, and better file management over the next few months.

In summary

I know all this sounds awfully complicated — and, well, it is. I understand and sympathise with those of you who are waiting for these features and I’m just as keen as you are to have them in place. Unfortunately these things take a lot of time and effort — even Microsoft, with all the resources at their disposal, are at least 18 months away from having a working release of Word on the iPad, if recent rumours are to believed. The important thing to know is that I’m very much aware of the needs of professional writers and have a solid roadmap in place for the future of UX Write.

This Month’s “Office for iPad delayed” Rumour

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Every now and then a “leak” comes out about a purported Microsoft roadmap saying that they’re planning a version of Office for iOS and Android, but it’s been delayed for one reason or another. This month is no exception, with a release slated for the second half of 2014 [1].

I honestly don’t know if these rumours are actually true, or just a clever PR stunt on behalf of Microsoft to discourage others from trying to produce competing apps. What I am certain of however is that the task of porting the huge legacy codebase of Office to the iPad must be absolutely daunting. Office is an immensely complicated piece of software, and if they are working on an iOS version, I’m not surprised it’s taking a while.

The best comment I’ve seen so far on the issue was one made in response to the Macrumors article, by a user named (well, I guess I have to say it if I want to quote them) nuckinfutz:

“Office is becoming irrelevant. The iPad has flourished despite not having MS Office and that’s an encouraging sign. The days of Microsoft software being a “must have” for success are over.

Today people just care about having some sort of import/export capability and are comfortable with non Microsoft solutions.”

I think there’s a great deal of truth in this. There’s a school of thought that considers MS Office as the be all and end all of productivity apps, and that every other piece of software must be measured by how closely it matches it. I disagree with that notion, and as nuckinfutz pointed out the most important thing is not whether you have MS Office per se, but whether you can actually get your work done and access your documents. UX Write fulfils this criteria.

In fact I’m of the view that MS Word is a really bad starting point if you’re trying to create a tablet word processor. We’ve seen what they’ve managed to come up with on the tablet form factor so far, and it leaves a lot to be desired, to put it mildly. UX Write has been designed from the ground up with mobile devices in mind – catering for the small screen, adapting cursor movement and selection for the on-screen keyboard, and making it dramatically more intuitive to achieve consistent formatting throughout your document.

This stuff is much easier to do if you’re starting from scratch. Sure, it takes a long time to get all the features people want and expect in, but that’s probably no less a task than porting a large codebase with lots of dependencies on Windows.

So why wait for Microsoft? Give UX Write a try today (which you can now do for free in your browser), and check it out in the app store if what you’re looking for is a high-end word processor that works well with existing docx files created in Word.

[1] Side note to Americans: “fall” (aka Autumn) occurs at a completely different time of year in Australia and other countries in the southern hemisphere. Months or quarters are less ambiguous 😉

Thoughts on the Blink/WebKit fork

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It’s been a few days now since Google announced their decision to start their own fork of WebKit, called Blink. I was initially quite surprised and disappointed by this, given the duplication of effort and fragmentation this could possibly lead to. I understood the situation much better however after reading Alex Russell’s post which explains their rationale, and I feel that all the reasons he gave make sense — that is, Google has more freedom to innovate by working separately from Apple.

There’s an even more important reason though that I think this is actually a good thing — diversity. People forget the dire state the web was in back in 1999, when Netscape was on its deathbed and Internet Explorer was emerging as the winner of the “browser wars”. Developers started targeting IE only, and those using anything else were left in the cold. People who argued against this were considered by the mainstream to be on the fringes of society, and ridiculed for not simply giving in and accepting the inevitable victory of the almighty IE6. My, how times have changed.

The KHTML library (which became WebKit) was initially created around this period by Lars Knoll and other developers involved with the KDE project, with the goal of producing a modern, high-quality browser for the Linux desktop. While KDE never saw the success it deserved, WebKit went on to become one of the biggest success stories of the open source movement, after being adopted & improved first by Apple (for Safari), and then by Google (for Chrome). What started out in its first few years as an underdog has now become the market leader on mobile by an overwhelming majority.

We’re now in the ironic situation where instead of the web being at risk of becoming an IE monoculture, it is now at risk of becoming a WebKit monoculture. Both of these things are bad; it’s important that web sites continue to be developed based on standards, not on the quirks of a particular browser engine. Multiple implementations are key to this — it ensures, in the long term, that all browsers converge towards consistent behaviour, and keeps the possibility open of entirely new browser engines being created in the future.

Although Blink and WebKit are identical right now, the fact that Google is going to follow a separate development path will help ensure that as the web evolves, we’ll have an additional implementation of all new APIs and layout features. There’ll undoubtedly be fragmentation problems with new features added to standards in the short term, but it will result an a better outcome in the long term as bugs are fixed to comply with the standards, and developers are forced to create sites that work in any browser, not just those based on WebKit.