Burro

Tab stops

After several weeks of promising I'd finally make progress on tab stops, I'm excited to share this screenshot:

This shows the "typesetting tabs" example from the Mom documentation, implemented in Burro. To be clear, this is far from a complete implementation. There are many problems to work out. For example:

• If one tab wraps around, the next tab will continue on the bottom baseline instead of going back to the top
• The first line is too low
• .quad[false] is not implemented (this is a change from the originally proposed design: .quad[true] is set by default, meaning the tab contents will wrap around once they exceed the tab length, and .quad[false] will allow the tab to go past its set length)
• Tabs within multiple columns won't work yet
• .quit_tabs currently has no effect

However, it's still rewarding for the end of this work to finally be in sight. Once these problems are ironed out, we can turn to

The road to 0.1.0

I've said before that tab stops were the last major feature remaining before . However, the list of minor features left has gotten longer and longer. Here are the items I have starred as pre-0.1 tasks in my personal list right now:

• Other fonts and weights (condensed, semibold, thin, etc.)
• Allow disabling ligatures
• Thin spaces
• Individual margin controls
• Hyperlinks
• Autoleading
• Images

To be honest, most of this is nice to have, but probably isn't necessary. It's frustrating right now because the first release feels so close but when I lay it out like this, it seems like there's still so much work to do. I might decide to only add a few of these (in particular, individual margin controls) before turning to preparing the 0.1 release. I'll still fix the open bugs in the issue tracker and add documentation. But with that said, we're to the point where getting a release out the door is more important than polishing any further. There will be plenty of time to do that after publicizing Burro and (hopefully) building a community!