I Moved an Image and My Document Broke!

I must confess, there have been endless times where I try my best to adhere to a format in Word or Google Docs and seem to find that, wow, my rest of the document is completely a mess and I have to revert back and try again, meticulously, to not disturb the formatting. This is probably the cast for most people dealing with creating documents.

And this really begs the question, why is this philosophy of writing, simply unpleasant.

A modern document is too dependent on the editor that created it. Weather it’s DOCX, Markdown, LaTeX, or any other format in this space, there's always some compromise on any of these frameworks to create a document. A well formatted, legible, easy to create document.

Especially in Linux.

And in this talk, I would deconstruct why traditional WYSIWYG(What You See Is What You Get) editors result in brittle, unpredictable documents and explain the necessity of decoupling the writing process from the document engine.

An editor shouldn't leave the writer worrying that changing a single font size will break their entire document.

And exactly for that, I want to discuss the technical challenges of building a widely adopted, semantic intermediate representation for text in this broken status quo. I will present practical architectural patterns for the software design.

Lastly, I will introduce Typewerx Axiom: an open-source document engine I have been working on very recently, designed to let’s say simply, Write Effortlessly.

1. Understand why modern document editors become fragile and unpredictable as documents grow.
2. Learn the principles behind semantic document architecture and interoperable document formats.
3. Explore the design challenges of building an open-source, next-generation document engine.