Roadmap

Roadmap

Every milestone of the original four-phase roadmap is done. Postext now sets whole books — textbooks, magazines, literary editions, catalogues — from enriched markdown to print-ready, accessible PDF, EPUB 3 and a 3D book. Work continues in programmes tracked as GitHub issues.

---

Open work

No programme is under way right now. Open requests are the issues; help translating the docs and the interface into more languages is tracked in #43.

---

Done since the first roadmap

Foundation

• ✅ Layout data structures, Pretext measurement, the markdown parser, the configuration schema

Editorial layout

• ✅ Multi-column layout, column-and-a-half with a side column for floats
• ✅ Column balancing, including closing pages, converging chapter by chapter
• ✅ Floats for figures, tables and boxes (column, page or side column), never overtaking each other
• ✅ Orphans, widows, runts and keep-together rules
• ✅ Tables split across pages, rotated tables, cell images
• ✅ Callouts that nest, float and split
• ✅ Pictures with a safe area that crop or grow to fill a column (#442)
• ✅ Videos (YouTube, Vimeo, own files): poster, play mark and QR code in print, players in HTML and EPUB (#460)

Typography

• ✅ Knuth-Plass line breaking and TeX hyphenation in eight languages
• ✅ Typed numbering and cross-references for figures, tables and custom types
• ✅ LaTeX maths
• ✅ Custom fonts
• ✅ Footnotes (#162), CSL citations and bibliographies, a back-of-book index (#165), a table of contents
• ✅ Heading styles, parts and part palettes, paragraph, callout and chip styles
• ✅ Chinese typesetting, horizontal and vertical (#203)
• ✅ Arabic typesetting, Modern Standard and Classical
• ✅ Japanese typesetting, vertical and horizontal (#440)

Output and tools

• ✅ Canvas and HTML renderers, the layout worker
• ✅ PDF with outlines, links, CMYK and grayscale, tagged PDF/UA-1
• ✅ EPUB 3, fixed layout and reflowable
• ✅ Folio, the 3D book viewer
• ✅ .postext bundles and the bundle API
• ✅ The Sandbox: books, Design panel, previews, phone layout
• ✅ The Cookbook, the showcase books and the built-in guide
• ✅ The postext-port agent skill
• ✅ The website in five languages, at WCAG 2.2 AAA

---

Not on the roadmap

These are deliberate scope decisions; see Architecture → Non-Goals:

• Layout on the server. Measurement uses canvas font metrics, so layout runs in a browser or a Web Worker; headless Chrome covers batch jobs. Writing the PDF or EPUB from a finished layout also works in Node.
• WYSIWYG editing. Postext lays out; it does not implement a page editor. (The Sandbox edits the markdown.)
• CSS column-count. Postext replaces CSS multi-column layout rather than wrapping it.
• Responsive breakpoint management. The caller decides when to lay out again.
• Collaborative editing. Layout is stateless; collaboration belongs in a higher layer.

---

How to influence the roadmap

• React with 👍 on the issues you need.
• Open an issue that describes the publication you are trying to set and where Postext falls short. A page that shows the problem helps more than a feature name.
• Use Discussions while an idea is still loose.
• pnpm cookbook coverage lists the features, questions and warnings no recipe covers yet, which is a good place to start contributing.

See Contributing and Development Setup before starting.