Marquee Styling

As we discussed in the Marquee Syntax article, most of the syntax in markdown is semantic, meaining that it concerns itself with the nature of what it encodes, rather than the look of it. The other side of the coin, how it looks, will be dealt with in this article. Note that this division between semantics and style is also seen in HTML5 where the looks is fully relegated to CSS and the tags are all semantic.

A slightly less cascading style specification

HTML has CSS to take care of styling for it, and that has over the years morphed into a sprawling and powerful language of it’s own. Both too complicated to support for something like marquee, and too complicated to be needed for styling markdown (after all it’s main goal is to style full webpages, not documents). Marquee instead defines it’s own limited styling system which is simple enough to reason about, and powerful enough to support what is needed for markdown text. Many concepts are borrowed from CSS so if you are used to that you should feel pretty much at home.

Styles

In marquee, a style defines the full specification for how an element (block or span) should visually appear. It holds 23 different settings concerning everything from font rendering, to spacing, coloring, and alignment. Rather than going through all here, I’ll point towards the documentation for the style() function.

While span and block elements takes the same style specifications, some settings only apply to block elements and are ignored for spans. These are lineheight, align, indent, hanging, margin, bullets, and img_asp.

Style sets

A style set is a collection of styles, each style related to a specific type of element. It does not need to provide a style for all elements in the text, and the elements doesn’t need to be complete. The only hard requirement is that it contains a complete style named base, from which everything else can be derived. marquee ships with a style set called classic_style() which aims to mimic the standard look of rendered markdown. New style sets can either be build from the ground up or based off of classic_style().

Inheritance

Marquee uses a very simple inheritance model for it’s styling, that can be boiled down to a single short sentance:

An element inherits any unspecified from it’s parent element.

Any setting in a style object set to NULL will be inherited from the parent all the way down to the base style (which is the reason why that style must be complete). As an example, let’s look at the style for the em element in the classic_style():

classic_style()[[1]]$em
#> <marquee_style[1]>
#> italic: TRUE

The only thing it touches is the italic setting, everything else is borrowed from whatever element it is placed into.

There are two other ways to influence style inheritance. The first one is wrapping a value in skip_inherit(). This will instruct marquee to inherit the value one level up in the hierarchy rather than from the direct parent (if the parent of the parent is also set to skip_inherit() it moves up yet another level, and so on). The second one is wrapping a numeric value in relative() which will instruct marquee to use the relative value as a multiplier applied to the parent.

Sizing

All sizes in a style is in (big)points (the distinction between bigpoints and points are rather small and boring. Bigpoints are 1/72 inches, which is what we use). Instead of setting a style setting directly to a numeric value, you can make it relative to the font size of the style using em(). This is beneficial for e.g. padding, margin, indent, etc. where you often want it to scale with the font size. In the case you set the size to an em value, it will be relative to it’s parent and effectively be equivalent to using relative(). There is a variant of em values called rem() (root em). Instead of making the setting relative to the size of the current element it makes it relative to the size in the base element of the document.

Side values

A style has three settings that relates to the four sides of a box. margin, padding, and border_size. These are set to values constructed with trbl(), which works like margin settings in CSS. If you provide it with 1 value it will set all sides to that value. If you provide it with two values and it will set top and bottom to the first and left and right to the second. If you provide it with three values it will set the top to the first, left and right to the second, and bottom to the third. If you provide it with four values it will set the top to the first, right to the second, bottom to the third, and left to the fourth (the bold first letters gives a clue to why the constructor is named as it is).