(2022-06-04) Kartik Plain Text With Lines

Kartik Agaram: Plain text. With lines. I like plain text. I also like doodling while I write.

What if we pretend we can go back in time, and create a transparent, gracefully degrading plain-text format that is trivial to build viewers and editors for?

Presenting lines.love. Initially it's a vanilla text editor.

But what are those little boxes?

Click on one, and you get a space you can draw in.

it's still plain text.

$ cat text
Hi there.
```lines
{"p2":{"x":141,"y":85},"mode":"line","p1":{"x":34,"y":44}}

*My current representation always divides up the page width into 256 parts so that each co-ordinate fits in a single byte. That feels like enough resolution for simple line drawings*

*above syntax combining Markdown and JSON*

*Step 1. Download Love2D*

*Take a moment here to appreciate the fine folks at LÖVE. They've built a marvel that is open source and easy for programmers to build and audit. You can now also try out a few thousand other games and tools on itch.io, most of them also open source and easy to take apart. I just love how this eco-system rewards curiosity.*

*when you need a drawing and click on one of those boxes, I want this to be as quick and easy to draw a few lines with as pen and paper. No searching for a menu to enter drawing mode, going into a whole new environment where you can't see what you wrote (I'm looking at you, Google Docs), and hitting save before you can see the drawing in your doc.*

*Lots of ideas gratefully stolen from the Sketchpad project* (sketching, diagram)