Notes in the seam

A reading edition is a text and its gloss, and there is nowhere in it to say the other thing — that this idiom is the one from chapter two, that the next four lines are a quotation, that the narrator has just changed register. A note is that somewhere: a short document in the seam between two subparagraphs.

1. Writing one#

Between any two subparagraphs — and after the last one — there is a faint + (write a note here), which shows when the pointer is in the seam. Press it, and a new note is made there and opens straight in the editor, over the page.

A note is a studio document. Not like one: the same store keeps it, the same editor edits it, the same renderer draws it, and every mark of the studio’s Markdown means what it means there — target-language text, colours, boxes, exercises, pictures, recordings; the guide’s sections on the studio and its Markdown dialect cover all of that. The note is written in the book’s language, so it opens in the same face and direction as the text beside it.

2. Reading one#

A seam with a note in it carries a small mark with the note’s title. Click it and the note opens over the page — not inside it, because the reading is the point, and a page with an essay between two subparagraphs would not be a reading edition any more. The window’s head has edit, which turns it into the editor, read, which turns it back, and ✕; Esc or a click outside close it. When it closes, the marks are redrawn, so a new title shows at once.

It opens at once, even from another room. What the window shows is the note on the studio’s own sheet — the same face, the same colours, the same marks — and nothing else: no editor, no scripts, none of the studio’s machinery. The reader also fetches the notes within a screen of where you are before you ask for one, so opening a mark is instant over a slow tunnel. Where the full page is wanted, open in the studio is in the window’s head. A note that holds an exercise opens the full studio page straight away instead, so an exercise is never shown as something that cannot be answered.

A folded run keeps its notes. Folding a run of paragraphs hides the seams, and with them their marks; so the fold bar carries a row of the marks of every note inside the run — the first three, then +N more, which shows the rest. Open the run and the row goes: the notes are back in their own seams.

They come with the book onto a phone. Keep on this phone lists them as one line of its own — its notes · 34 · about 280 kB — ticked to begin with, and you can untick it like any other. Kept, the marks are in their seams and the notes open with the computer asleep, off or a train away, in the studio’s own face and colours; a note that holds an exercise can be answered there exactly as it can at the desk. Their pictures come with them; their recordings are a line of their own further down the list, beside the book’s narrations, so nothing heavy is ever kept by surprise. Write a new note at the desk and its mark appears on the phone the next time the two can reach each other, without keeping anything again — and the book says it is out of date, so the note itself is one tap away. A note you delete is given back the next time you press Save on that list, which says how many before it does it. All of it: Browser and Mobile.

Rest the pointer on a mark first, and after a moment — a third of a second, so that sweeping across a seam on the way to a word does not light up every note it passes — a small card opens beside it: the note’s title and the start of what it says, a few lines of plain text. The keyboard gets the same card: Tab to a mark and wait. The card goes when the pointer leaves, on Esc, on a click and on any scroll; it stays while the pointer is on the card itself, so a long excerpt can be read to the end, and once one card is up the next mark along shows its own at once. On a touch screen there is no hover and so no card: a tap opens the note.

The card is letters and nothing else. A note is a file that travels — in a book’s download, written in somebody else’s toolbox — so a card that opens because a pointer crossed a seam never does more than show text: nothing in the note’s Markdown is run or drawn there. Clicking the mark, which opens the note’s page, is the choice it always was.

3. Where notes live#

In the book’s own folder, never in the studio’s library, because a note is about this book:

books/persian/<slug>/markdown/<language>/<id>/source.md

They travel in the book’s download in every shape, even the text alone: they are part of the content (Taking a book away).

Two things a note does not have. It is never built into a PDF and never downloaded as .tex — it is read on its page and nowhere else, and the server refuses those doors for a note rather than merely hiding them. And it is in no prompt: nothing Parseh hands a model mentions notes. A note is your reading of your own book.

4. Where a note says it sits#

In its own front matter, one line:

---title: On the second qasidatarget: faanchor: after sub 1.2-6f8f21d7175b---

before or after, then sub (a subparagraph), then the subparagraph’s key: its label and a fingerprint of its text. The key stays the same through a rebuild, an edited chunk, and chunks cut or joined — so a note stays put through all of those.

The front matter, and not a database, because the file is the truth here as everywhere in Parseh: moving a note is editing that one line, in the editor like any other line of the note.

A note whose anchor names a place that is no longer there — the text was rewritten under it, or the line was mistyped — is not dropped and is not an error. It is shown at the end of the book, marked adrift (this note names a place that is no longer in the book — open it to see what it says, and change its anchor line), which is where somebody will look for it.