@dan I’d like to know what the plan is for the Typography component and when we can expect it to support all of the missing features that would allow it to better handle displaying the contents of MD files from the CMS.
It seems this component has not seen any attention in some time, and it is the one that should be the most rock soild as there is so much content that needs to go into this component.
As far as I’m concerned, it is the weakest component in Elements, and yet it is one of the most critical for any site with a lot of content.
Any info on the future plans for this component would be greatly appreciated.
The typography component is geared towards long-form text and can be controlled through settings you create in the Theme Editor. This allows you to specify styling for all of the standard HTML elements, like headings. Then, when you enter text in the component and specify something like a HEADING 4, it will pick up that styling info and apply it to the heading you entered.
Then, when you switch themes, you can switch these typography settings to suit.
It is very powerful, but it is currently incomplete. It can do a lot more than a regular text block.
If you use the CMS and you have a Markdown file and you want to display the contents, you would typically have to use a typography component to handle most of the styling created in Markdown. If you use a plain text component, you would not get all of the Markdown styling.
I’m sure @ben or @dan can do a better job of explaining it than I can.
I don’t use Markdown or CMS but can see advantages of having different size/style fonts in the same box rather than doing it the clumsy way I do it. Will have to have a play around.
In theory, it would need to support everything you can do with Markdown if it is going to serve as the means of displaying content from an MD file.
This implies support for both ordered and unordered lists, as you mentioned, but more importantly, embedded images. If I look at all of my old MD blog entry files 80% of them have images embedded within the markdown. There is no way of handling this with the CMS, currently.
Then there is support for things like superscript and subscript, which would be very useful.
The other thing that is missing in this component is support for columns of text. This is something that can be incredibly handy when doing long-form text and seems to make sense to be built into this component.
Because you can do it in Markdown, it seems support for tables would also be appropriate, although for me, that could be added at a later date. Lists are far more important.
One of the other things I find disconcerting with the typography component is that you cannot set them up to have a persistent style sheet attached, which makes it very hard to set them up as templates. Whenever you apply one from a template, you have to remember to go and set up the style; otherwise, things don’t look right. I had thought something like PRESETS would address this, but I have not heard much about the use of presets for some time.
I get the point of the typography component, but I guess my confusion is the dual role it is now playing with the presence of the CMS. Why not just have a Markdown component that fully supports the language and can then be used either with the CMS or by anyone willing to write in Markdown? I’m on the verge of considering writing something like this myself, using one of the standard libraries to render the markdown.
I’m sure there are some other missing features that I have forgotten.
