Stretchtext Authoring System

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Have you ever found yourself in a conversation which followed too many rabbit trails? Have you ever read an article which did the same? What if you could have digressions and concise style in the same document?

My StretchText writing system, based on research by Anders Fagerjord and inspiration from Ted Nelson, made it easy for non-technical authors to generate stretchtext documents. It featured:

  • Expanding/collapsing paragraphs
  • Expanding illustrations with captions
  • Contextual marginal notes
  • Expanding quotations which show more of the context when you click on them

Mark Bernstein once mentioned to me that his paper "On Hypertext Narration" was encouraged by this project.

A sample stretchtext document is available at natematias.com/stretchtext.