The Early Text Compositor
The Early Text Compositor is a VSCode extension for contributing to the
Early Text Corpus, a collection of
diplomatic digital editions of texts from the hand press era, stored in
Markit — a human-friendly markup
language designed for early text preservation.
The extension activates when VSCode is opened in a clone of the corpus (it
looks for data/authors; if the corpus is a subfolder of the workspace, point
compositor.corpusRoot at it). Git stays in the contributor's hands — the
extension reads and writes the working tree, nothing more.
It sits on top of the Markit language extension
(declared as an extension dependency), which provides syntax highlighting,
live compile errors, formatting, and preview for individual .mit files. The
Compositor adds the corpus layer:
- Corpus Browser — an activity-bar tree of authors → works → editions,
labelled from metadata (names, titles, years; the canonical edition is
starred). Clicking an author or edition opens its file; works expand to
their editions, with the metadata stub on the context menu.
- Validation — the corpus's full rule set (the same rules
deno task validate runs) published to the Problems panel, with a status-bar summary
and a badge on the tree. Saving a file revalidates in about a second; the
initial load compiles the whole corpus and takes ~20s.
- Scaffolding — New Author, New Work (with its first edition), and New
Edition commands that prompt for the required metadata and write canonical,
already-formatted files.
- Fix Formatting — the one-click equivalent of the corpus's
deno task fix, applying the Markit formatter to every file.
- Insert Borrowed Section Reference — pick an edition from the catalogue
and insert a
## <Author.Work.Edition> placeholder at the cursor.
All corpus logic (catalogue building, validation rules, path conventions) is
bundled from the corpus repository itself via the @earlytexts/corpus
package, so the rules cannot drift from the corpus's own — and contributors
need nothing installed beyond VSCode.
Development
The corpus, markit, and compositor repositories are expected to be sibling
checkouts (@earlytexts/corpus is a file:../corpus dependency).
npm install
npm run compile # bundle to dist/ (npm run watch for development)
npm run check # typecheck
npm test # unit tests (scaffold templates against the real rule set)
npm run package # build the .vsix
To try it: open this folder in VSCode, press F5, and open the corpus folder
in the Extension Development Host.
