Advanced Comic Book Linking

In my previous post about Peruse's support for ACBF Textareas, i talked about how the formatting system there allowed for all manner of niftiness with languages, and rotating text, and making it coloured, and styled, and all of that visual fanciness. In this one, i'm going to talk a bit more in depth about a quite powerful feature the Textareas have that i kind of glossed over in that one: Hyperlinks.

Yes, hyperlinks. Links, like the one you just clicked on above to work out what that last post actually said about textareas (thanks for reading! :) ). Except that these links are inside any of the things in an ACBF document which can hold paragraphs of text, being primarily Textareas, References, and Annotations. The reason this is a separate post (apart from the fact the other one had a different focus) is that ACBF recently gained the ability to add a resource target (that is to say, a href property) to the Jump element.

Linking to some URL, and protecting people

For a simple starter, the most usual suspects for hyperlinks work for this: Websites (http(s)://) and email links (mailto:), primarily. If you click on one of those in Peruse, don't worry, we're not going to send you anywhere without making sure you want to actually go there. On the web, you usually would be expected to trust whatever you're clicking on, but inside a book, you'd reasonably expect to be constrained, so before sending you anywhere that isn't inside the book, you get a cute little popup that shows you the address of the link you clicked on, and asks if you really do want to follow it.

Additionally, and very possibly more interesting when creating a book: Internal links work as well. If an object in the book has been given an ID (which is now also more widely possible), you can link to it by prepending it with a # and using that as your link target (which is similar to how you might link to a named anchor in a simple html document). In its simplest form, this allows you to jump from page to page (which also is what the Jump element was originally designed to do), but with this system, much more power is added, by being able to link to not only pages, but also individual frames, and the reference and binary objects.

Linking to a page or a frame will make Peruse navigate to that location in the book, as you would expect (the way Jumps previously would link directly to a page). The idea there is to allow you to create branching narratives and other interactions of that type, like those you would find in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Of course, ACBF is not a scripting system, and Peruse doesn't have one either; this is "just" markup, so it's not like you can create a full blown game here, in the modern sense, but even then, engaging narratives do not require score keeping for their interest :D

Say you've got a lovely CC-BY banner, and want to show the license? Pop the text in a Reference, and Jump away!

Linking to a reference or a binary object will make Peruse display that object in a popup or a page. An author can use this to create a glossary of terms, for example, or character reference art, a location map, or a world encyclopedia built right into the book itself. As someone who does writing and world building in their spare time, this in itself is something that i'm hoping to expand on greatly (how does having a pile of world-building focused templates for references sound to you? Sounds kind of neat to me, and i'd really like to see that happen :) ).

Something else Peruse does is keep track of all these internal links. Or, rather, the libacbf code does - we built that library as a non-gui Qt style library to be consumable without being bound to Peruse, but more on that at some later date (Tier 1 ACBF KDE Framework anybody? ;) ). What that means is that if you are at a location in a book which is linked to by something else, Peruse knows about it.

Right now, that information isn't used, but we might imagine things like building two-way navigation in the book (say you click a link, and you want to go back to where you came from; well with this we can make sure that happens), or even building entire navigation maps for a book (technically this tracking system for the internal links constitutes a directional graph, where each node is a location in the book, and the edges are the links). How such a thing would be presented visually, i'm frankly unsure, but as a basic idea it feels like it could be fun!

If this sounds like something you'd like to work with, get in touch - either here, or anywhere else you find me - i'm leinir basically everywhere, and we've got our own little corner over on Matrix as well. In short, get in touch, we'd love to hear from you! :)

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The word of the day is: Emergent. Because that's the kind of behaviour these bits of functionality promises