Typography was orphaned on 6 August 1991, when the internet was made public. Since that day, we’ve had to live with a deficient display of copy.
There has been advice given for improving the inadequacy, but although some solutions work, none of the solutions were simple to implement – until now, that is.

Scribe is BWD’s latest stack and it shows that it is, after all, possible to teach an old dog new tricks. Not only does Scribe improve your copy, but it’s flexible enough to build a complete webpage within a single stack – without even using a theme. Fewer stacks means better code and faster rendering times.

Scribe is a markdown stack, but no worries if, like me, you haven’t concerned yourself with markdown before; you can simply write your text as you normally would. Returns automatically create correctly spaced paragraphs. The result is an improvement over using standard paragraph stacks and you’ll need fewer stacks to to compose long passages with multiple paragraphs.

If you would, however, like to use markdown, basic formatting is simple enough:
‘#’ for instance will give you an h1 formatting. ‘##’ will result in an h2 etc. etc.

For more complicated content the Ulysses markdown app comes highly recommended. It’s simple to use and no Markdown knowledge is required.
Once finished, copy your content from Ulysses into Scribe and use Scribe’s child stacks to refine your text.

Andrew’s extensive demo pages will give you a far better idea of Scribe’s capabilities than I could ever give you here. Don’t just skim the pages, take your time. I assure you that when you’re finished, you’ll want to download both the stack and the demo project!

A few days ago Jeroen (Marathia's Stacks) released two "Pay What You Want" stacks – Squiggle and Spoiler. Squiggle replaces any Strikethrough text with a – well – squiggly line and Spoiler redacts spoiler text or images until your visitor wants to view them.

Squiggle can replace the standard Strikethrough with a scribbled line. I don't use Strikethrough very often (if you check my over 400 blogposts, you'll discover it just once), but if I did, I might be tempted to use Squiggle. Squiggle can be configured to be of any colour and, if you're in a bad mood, can be as intense as a felt-tipped-pen!


Stack settings
Target – Strike inside this stack, All strike on page, Strike with custom selector
Intensity – 1– straight line — 200–Irate
Set thickness – Auto, Manual
Set Colour – Auto, Manual
Move Up/Down

Don't you just love it?
You're looking for a review of a film or a book and stumble upon a page that iterates the complete plot.
Damn! Don't need to read the book any more!
If you have spoiler text on your page, you can hide it from view until the discerning reader really wants to read it with Spoiler.
Spoiler can cloak text elements by either covering them with coloured bars, or by blurring them so they are unreadable.

Stack settings
Apply To – Underlined text in stack, Whole content (including images), All text with a class
Effect – Blur, Cover
Change Cursor – Visible, Hidden
Tool Tip Text – When hidden, When Visible

Spoiler Text Whole Stack+Effect Cover Only
Text When Hidden
Hidden Text Colour
Custom Font Size
Style – B, I, U
Font Family – Theme default, Web safe, Custom
Set Custom Line Height
Colour Hidden
Colour Visible

Squiggle and Spoiler are two stacks that can be used to a) Represent content that is no longer relevant or accurate and b) Hide content that you don''t want your visitor to be able to view immediately. And – you can pay what you want!

Floating images. There's a stack for that – right? Right the tenth, or eleventh stack from the top of the library! Float an image to the right, or left of your text content. I never used it because I come from the world of DTP and found that floating images could look quite terrible compared to a professional layout app. However CSS is slowly catching up and Will Woodgate has released a new stack that takes advantage of the latest CSS additions: CutOut – a free stack from Stacks4Stacks.

CutOut is a stack that allows your text to gracefully flow around your image instead of the standard rectangular float that we have become used to. Check out the screenshot below:

The left half of the image displays a regular floating image. The right half of the image displays a floating image when using CutOut. Notice a difference?

CutOut makes use of the new 'shape-outside' CSS definition which is supported by all newer browsers (If you wish to know exactly which browsers take a look here). Shape Outside allows a text to flow around a pre-defined form. The form can be circular or polygonal. Polygonal shapes are highly experimental, but 0% 0%, 100% 0%, 50% 100% for instance, will create a triangular shape. CutOut degrades to a regular floating image on older browsers.

You can drop any Square (i.e. with equal length sides) image into CutOut and your image will automatically be displayed as a circular image which your text will flow around. If you require a more complicated shape, you'll need to search the web for shapes, or experiment.

How it works. Drag Cutout into a stacks page and you'll be presented with a dummy text. Replace the text with your text and drag your image into the image well in the stack settings panel. It's that simple. Of course, CutOut wouldn't be an S4S stack, if it didn't support warehoused images, but you'll also notice that it also has a setting for WebYep CMS images [Teaser]. WebYep2 is nearing release and CutOut already supports the new CMS system (as will a number of other S4S stacks).

Stack settings
Image Source – Drag & Drop, Warehoused, WebYep CMS
Standard Image
Retina Image
CutOut Shape – Circle (default), Elipse, Inset, Polygon
Image Float – Left, Right
Apply Border Radius – Default 50%
Breakpoint
Spacing – Space between image and content below breakpoint
Image Width – px
Image Margin – Top, Bottom, Left, Right
Image Width – Below breakpoint
Image Link
Content Type – HTML, Markdown, Text (default), WebYep Short and Long
Content Padding – Top, Right, Bottom, Left

With some experimenting, CutOut will allow you to create some very interesting text flows around your images. Oh, and did I mention that CutOut is a free stack?

Once a year, or so it would seem, a new Tickertape stack arrives on the market. Gary at Doobox just released Typist, a stack that not only writes your text, but can then carry out further actions.

Typist is one of those stacks that is quite unique, it can type a text on your page at varying speeds and then reveal a second stack. If you wish, Typist can then continue to type further text, and then (repeat the above)…
… cool, or what?

Typist will trigger n seconds (you set the time) after it is scrolled into view. If it visible on page load, it begins to type immediately after the time you have defined.

Stack settings
Trigger – When Scrolled into view, Triggered When Type Stack Above Ends
Delay – Seconds
Text Type – Paragraph, H1—H6
Colours – Theme, Custom
Align – Left, Centre, Right
Humanize – Typing speed – adds a human-like feel to the typing
On Complete – Do Nothing, Remove Flashing Cursor, Show Extra Content Below

Typist could theoretically build a whole page as your visitor views it.
A novel stack that I'm sure will appear on many websites in the near future.

Today is December 31, 2017. Well, it was when I wrote this, but for you, it will already be 2018. So what if you need to display today's current date on your RapidWeaver page and keep it updated? 2day from Marathia's Stacks can help you do that easily.

I could, of course, have installed a script on this page that would keep the date above current and demonstrate exactly how 2day works but, as I'm on a tight schedule, I decided against it — too much work!
It would, however, have cost me just a few seconds to add Jeroen's 2day to the top of the page and to display a message with the date, formatted exactly as I wanted. But I no longer want to permanently display today's date. Been there, done that, didn't like the t-shirt any more.

With 2day, you can format your date exactly as you want it to appear, with custom text both before and after today's date, so that your message says exactly what you want it to.

Stack settings
Text before Date – Enter a prefix of your choice, e.g. 'Today is '
Item #1 – Name of Day, Name of Month, Day of Month 1–31, Day of Month 01–31, Year 2 digits, Year 4 digits.
After Item #1 – Divider of your choice, e.g. comma. slash etc.
The same settings are available for items 2–4, but include the option 'Do not use'
Text after Date – Enter a suffix of your choice

Text Styling
Font Size
Font Colour
Alignment
Style – Bold, Italic, Underline
Font Family – Theme Default, Web Safe Font, Custom Font

The names for each of the months and days may be localised.

2day also has a sister stack – LastPublished. The RapidWeaver snippet '%last_published%' used to publish a simple date, e.g. 31/12/2017, but the snippet is no longer supported. At the same time, the snippet doesn't really say a lot.
LastPublished has the same settings as 2day, but will display the publishing date instead of the current date, so that you can supply your visitors with a more descriptive date in any format that you wish.

2day and LastPublished, two useful 'pay what you want' stacks for displaying dates.

Whilst we're on the subject of Marathia's Stacks; Jeroen also published two free page background stacks to round off 2017!
Shards generates a random, angular page background pattern with up to 3 colours, plus a fallback colour for older browsers, that resembles neon shards.
Nebula generates a random background pattern that resembles nebulas in space. Nebula supports 2 colours and a fallback colour.
At first, I wasn't too impressed by Shards, but saw potential with Nebula. With time, however, both stacks sort of grow on you…