No. 03 · Study
What a paste becomes
Blank lines are already a kind of structure. Pasted onto the Slate, they decide where one piece of writing ends and the next begins, and the words themselves are never touched.
When people paste a block of text, they have usually already structured it. A single blank line separates paragraphs that belong together; a wider gap separates things that do not. Most editors keep the gaps and discard the meaning.
The Slate is a writing surface made of separate cells. Paste into it, and those gaps are read the way they were meant: two or more blank lines start a new cell, and within a cell each paragraph is set in a lighter envelope of its own. Nothing is rewritten. The characters you pasted are the characters you keep; only the boundaries are new.
One blank line separates paragraphs. Two or more blank lines separate pieces.
Becomes
Edit the invented text on the left, or paste your own, and switch between surfaces. This is a re-implementation of the documented rule for this page, running in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.
Envelopes are relative
An envelope is simply a boundary around some writing. A cell is one; a paragraph inside it can be another. The second is called minor, but only from where you are standing. Look at it on its own and it is the main envelope, and whatever it holds is minor to it. Nothing in the idea limits how deep that goes.
Three surfaces, three promises
The same text pasted in three places is treated three ways, and each is a promise. The Slate slices, because it is for gathering and arranging. The Page tidies runs of blank lines, because it is for a single piece of writing. The pastebin does nothing at all, because its whole purpose is to keep text exactly as it was given.
Where it stands
Exists
- One rule per surface, the same on web, Mac and iPhone, held to one shared set of test cases.
- On the Slate, two or more blank lines start a new cell; one blank line sets each paragraph in its own minor envelope.
- The Page folds long runs of blank lines; the pastebin keeps text exactly as given.
- Undo for a paste that was sliced, while nothing it made has changed.
Not yet, or not decided
- A way to make a minor envelope by hand. For now only a paste makes one.
- Moving into an envelope and back out of it, so that a minor envelope can be looked at as the main one.