Project Folders and Fresh UI

While manufacturing is being dialed in with Soldered in Croatia, software gets a facelift back home.

The AUTEUR writing application is finished in the sense that it does everything I initially set out to make it do, and unfinished in the sense that every week, I find one more quality of life improvement to make for the e-ink experience. August saw four of those improvements and an exciting component coming in the mail.

Custom AUTEUR Garamond

This is the fifth time I have rescaled AUTEUR's custom Garamond typeface, across every size and every editor mode.

Characters on e-paper do not behave the way characters on LCD displays behave. There is no subpixel rendering to hide behind. Every glyph is a bitmap that was baked at a specific pixel size to maximize realtime rendering speed and the difference between a letterform that looks printed and a letterform that looks like a screenshot of a letterform comes down to how the stems land on the pixel grid. Get it wrong, and the vertical strokes in a paragraph fall out of register with each other, some a pixel wide, some two, and the page develops a texture you can feel before you can name it.

The faces were regenerated from their outlines rather than scaled from bitmaps, hinted at the target size instead of near it, and the bold weights are now emboldened at the outline level before rasterization rather than dilated afterward. The stem inconsistency across a full page of prose dropped by about a third. The screenwriting face, which sits on a fixed grid to match how a script prints, got the same treatment.

Ideally, you won't notice any of this. That's the point. Your writing should look and feel like a printed page.

The AUTEUR footer

There's an info strip along the bottom of the display for writing session data that's always available at a glance within your draft. Footer visibility could potentially be set to toggle in the future.

It now reads as a dashboard: Word count on the left, the project you are currently writing inside, centered, and page count on the right. The counters that used to tell you your draft position in a list are gone, because they were answering a question nobody asks while writing.

The strip also moved. On an e-paper panel the baseline of a footer is not only a styling decision but a physical one, because the region has to be cleared and redrawn without disturbing the text above it. All of the floors are now pinned to the same pixel row by construction rather than by arithmetic that happened to agree. It stopped drifting between modes. Small thing. It had bothered me for months.

Project folders

Drafts have always saved themselves, and cycling from one to the next has always been two shortcuts (Ctrl+J/Ctrl+L). What was missing was any way to say that these eleven drafts are the pilot and those four are the novel.

So there are projects now. From the searchable draft browser, you can assign any draft to a folder and the project browser will filter to it. From the editor, one shortcut takes you to the project list (Ctrl+P). From the draft browser, the same shortcut takes you to the project assignment screen. New projects are created from that same screen, so you never leave the browser to file something. The drafts list shows eight drafts at a time, rows titled by their first line so you are reading your own words back instead of a filename, and the page indicator moved up into the title band where it belongs.

Two icons went in alongside this, a page and a folder, drawn at two-pixel stroke and carved directly into the font at codepoints nothing else was using. It was easier than adding an image path to a rendering pipeline that has exactly one job and does it fast. It also means the icons hint and scale like everything else on the screen, which is the kind of accident I will happily take credit for.

A frontlit panel is in the mail

The last open question on the display is light.

A frontlight on e-paper is an optically bonded layer that sits over the panel and washes it evenly from the edge. It is not a backlight. Nothing is shining through the page at your eyes. But bonding anything to the front of a reflective display changes the surface, and I want to see with my own eyes what it does to contrast in daylight, at a desk lamp, and at two in the morning, which is when most of the writing I care about actually happens.

So a frontlit unit is being shipped to me to sit next to an unlit one. If the lit panel costs contrast in the conditions where you would never turn the light on anyway, that is a real trade and I will say so here. If it does not, then AUTEUR works at night without a lamp, which is worth doing.

And that's August! Beautiful Garamond that's been meticulously aligned at every reading scale, a footer that accurately tracks page count, folders that keep the snippets away from the chapters, and a panel in the mail that will settle an argument I have been having with myself since Spring.

Ciao!