Markdown Comments in Textpattern

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I’ve switched the formatting syntax in the comment processor from Textile to the more well-known Markdown — specifically Michel Fortin’s MarkdownExtra, since I wanted readers to have the access to such amenities as footnotes, tables, and the like.

Fortin’s recommended method of installing MarkdownExtra for Textpattern is to rename markdown.php to classTextile.php and drop this file in place of Textpattern’s old one. This works well but it brings a big security hazard: Markdown syntax explicitly allows the use of plain HTML, but Fortin’s class does no filtering for malicious content (unlike Textile, which has options for escaping all HTML when processing user comments). This means that if you don’t do any extra work, you leave yourself pretty wide open to XSS attacks.

My solution was to bolt on the excellent HTML Purifier package. After installing it on the server, edit the new classTextile.php, and add this line just above the definition for class Textile:

require_once '/path/to/web/plugins/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier.standalone.php';

Then change the TextileRestricted function to read as follows:

function TextileRestricted($text, $lite='', $noimage='') {
    $purifier = new HTMLPurifier();
    $text = $purifier->purify($text);
    return $this->TextileThis($text, $lite);
}

Re: The New Orthography: Handwriting, Calligraphy and Shorthand

Graphology posits that handwriting is deeply symptomatic — of attitudes, personality, and character — an idea to which I am receptive, even though all the incarnations I’ve seen include long lists of claims which are conspicuously evidence-free.

But the application of new orthographies is not concerned so much with diagnosing the person, but rather with the question: Might not writing by hand be deeply causal as well?

The above is a note added to an earlier post…

Re: The New Orthography: Handwriting, Calligraphy and Shorthand

The Writing Hand

It’s possible that writing by hand opens up vastly more expressive bandwidth than does typing by allowing for additional channels of expression: pressure, shape of strokes, speed.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, when writing by hand I am usually aware of having done a tremendously more thorough job of recording every layer and color of my “mind-state” at the time. My thoughts also seem to return much more fully-formed when I review handwritten notes vs typed notes.

The above is a note added to an earlier post…

Re: The New Orthography: Handwriting, Calligraphy and Shorthand

“In handwriting the brain is mediated by the drawing hand, in typewriting by the fingers hitting the keyboard, in dictation by the idea of a vocal style, in word processing by touching the keyboard and by the screen’s feedback. The fact seems to be that each of these methods produces a different syntactic result from the same brain. Maybe the crucial element in handwriting is that the hand is simultaneously drawing. I know I’m very conscious of hidden imagery in handwriting—a subtext of a rudimentary picture language. Perhaps that tends to enforce more cooperation from the other side of the brain. And perhaps that extra load of right brain suggestions prompts a different succession of words and ideas.”

— Ted Hughes, interview in Paris Review, Issue No. 134 (Spring 1995)

The above is a note added to an earlier post…

Re: The New Orthography: Handwriting, Calligraphy and Shorthand

The calligraphic element in Z. D. Smith’s Abbreviations reminds me also of Elian Script, which evolved from a simple grid-based alphanumeric code into a highly calligraphic script that resembles Chinese pictograms while remaining essentially phonetic.

Early version of Elian script
Early version of Elian script

Later version with calligraphic elements
Later version with calligraphic elements

The above is a note added to an earlier post…

Re: Waiting For Podcast Transcripts

As the Guardian’s technology editor, Charles Arthur, points out in the Independent back in 2005, “Podcasts take content and put it into a form that can’t be indexed by search engines or be speed-read, and which you can’t hyperlink to (or from). A podcast sits proud of the flat expanse of the Internet like a poppy in a field. Until we get really good automatic speech-to-text converters, such content will remain outside the useful, indexable web.”

— Why Audio Never Goes Viral on digg.com, Jan 14, 2014.

The article is very long and the whole thing is worth reading.

The above is a note added to an earlier post…

Re: The New Orthography: Handwriting, Calligraphy and Shorthand

Tolkien’s Tengwar elvish writing is probably the most widely known new orthography:

Saruman's Book
A shot of Saruman’s Book from the Two Towers extended edition.

Tengwar was designed with an intentionally limited, and elegant, visual vocabulary: stems which can be short or long, and ascend or descend; boughs, which can be single or double, open or closed; and diacritics. Each aspect of a stroke corresponds with its phonetic sound.

Like other new orthographies, the basic system lends itself well to customization. There are many, many calligraphic styles of Tengwar.

The above is a note added to an earlier post…

Re: The New Orthography: Handwriting, Calligraphy and Shorthand

Upon seeing his samples, I was immediately reminded of the “Luxeuil Miniscule” family of calligraphy as described in Marc Drogin’s book Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique (samples below).

Ductus for Luxeuil Miniscule

Luxeuil Miniscule sample, early 8th century, French

Marc Drogin writes the following about the evolution of “charter hands” such as Luxeuil Miniscule:

“However, when it came to the creation of a script in which to write legal documents a special quality was required. A good charter hand or court hand was so ornate that one viewed it with awe, and so complicated that it not only resisted forgery but could not be understood by those who had no business reading it.”

He continues, “Sometimes this succeeded too well…”

The above is a note added to an earlier post…

Re: The New Orthography: Handwriting, Calligraphy and Shorthand

The New Abbreviations by Z. D. Smith incorporates all three of these things, and was the first thing to set me thinking about examples of what I am calling New Orthographies.

“For the last six years or so, I’ve worked on a complete and comprehensive system of transcription-based shorthand which takes its inspiration primarily from the abbreviationes of the medieval scribal tradition.” – Z. D. Smith

Click on the images/link above to read his complete writings on the subject.

The above is a note added to an earlier post…

The New Orthography: Handwriting, Calligraphy and Shorthand

∞ · · 10 Notes

There is a special creative space occupied by the overlap between these three expressions of writing:

  • Handwriting, once a commonplace skill and now displaced by keyboards, is moving into the realm of craft, something we cultivate as a form of personal expression rather than for its utility.

  • Calligraphy is the practice of handwriting using a broad-tip instrument (pen or brush) to give letterforms a new level of expressiveness. Within all handwriting and calligraphy there is a “cursive/printing” spectrum. Styles on the “printing” end of this spectrum lay emphasis on legibility at the price of speed. Styles on the “cursive” end lay emphasis on speed (via combine pen strokes to create ligatures, for example), and on subsuming individual words into the broad visual texture of the page, at the price of legibility.

  • Shorthand is the collapsing of whole words into individual glyphs and even individual strokes. While shorthand proper — formally encoding large swaths of useful vocabulary - is now even more obsolete than handwriting, in limited forms it turns up frequently in cursive calligraphic forms: single strokes for “and”, “the” and “of” are common examples.

At the overlap between these three lies the customized orthography, or the “new” orthography: any highly unique system of writing developed by a single individual.

On this page we examine these New Orthographies and the meaning behind their development. This page is a progression of thoughts first collected at New Orthography on ThoughtStreams.

Continue reading…