What's Coming in 0.7

[Nathan Yergler]

It's PyCon time, which means I've been doing a lot of work on
Hieroglyph as I prepare for the conference. I'm really excited about
the 0.7 release we've been working on, as it contains a lot of
improvements to the codebase. I wanted to send this email around
highlighting what's changed, what's planned yet, and solicit any
feedback users may have.

So what's changed already heading into Hieroglyph 0.7?

* There are many more tests, and all new features have tests written
for them. This has changed the way it feels for me to develop
Hieroglyph, and makes me much more confident in the 0.7 release (even
though it has lots of new things in it).

* There's a new theme, "slides2", that will probably be the default.
(Issue #48) Most of the work for this is complete, with documentation
and presenter notes handling outstanding. I'm using it for my talk at
PyCon, which means that I'll almost certainly be figuring out the
issue with presenter notes before then :).

* To support the new theme, Hieroglyph now uses small templates to
render the individual slides. This means the output is less tied to a
particular markup, and gives us lots of future flexibility.

* Sections defined in "ifnotslides" and "ifslides" directives will now
appear in table of contents correctly.

* The nextslide directive was added, which allows you to easily split
a section of content into multiple slides. This was a user suggestion,
and I've been happily using it in my PyCon deck. I love it, and think
it's going to make converting documentation to presentations much
easier.

* Several bugs have been fixed in the handling of static output

What's outstanding? A few things.

* Documentation. As I've been talking to users and working on these
changes, I've noticed some areas this can improve: the behavior of
incremental builds, how you override styling of a theme, what you have
to do in order to make a theme.

* Single file output: A long standing suggestion is the ability to
generate a single HTML file with all CSS and HTML inlined. I love this
idea, and after working on the new theme, think it's totally
achievable. I'd like to get this done for 0.7

* Printing/PDF support: This may be addressed (in a "good enough"
manner) by the new theme, but right now a real sore point of using
Hieroglyph is that it's difficult to get decent PDF output. I think
some judicious styling and media queries could help with that.

If anyone has thoughts about pain points or things they would
particularly like to see in the next release, please let me know.

Thanks!

NRY