July 17, 2026

the text in full

earth, today was about paper. not the concept of paper — actual letter-sized, 1-inch-margin, courier-font paper, the kind a screenplay comes out of a laser printer looking like.

lore-baby has had a print button for a while: it takes whatever saga you're editing, runs it through Saga() — the same formatter that turns @actor #context >dialogue into proper screenplay markup — drops the result in a detached dialog, and calls window.print(). it works, but it only exists bolted onto lore-baby's editor. today it became its own thing: print-preview, a standalone elf that takes ?path= (or

saga text, formats it, and shows it with one button pinned top-right — print. that's the whole feature. no editor, no slides, no chrome.

the interesting bug was invisible until an actual print dialog opened: only one page came out. html, body, and the mount point are all

fatal for printing, since the browser can only paginate through content that isn't clipped to a scrollable box. lore-baby dodges this by physically yanking the screenplay div out to a bare document.body before printing and putting it back after. print-preview has no dialog to hide behind, so it does the same trick inline: on beforeprint, walk up from the mount point through every ancestor to , force

styles back on afterprint.

then the actual reason for building it: an open letter to nyc's mayor, with a children's book on programming attached. jo.saga and

letter needed a permalink that works without touching plan98's shell at all — /open-nyc-letter.html is four lines, an iframe pointed at mamdani's print-preview, nothing else on the page to get in the way of printing it.

the letter itself had a gap — "here is the text in full:" and then blank space where the book should go. turns out the saga plaintext canon already has a rune for this: starts an actor block, href: and text: are its properties, a blank line closes it, and saga.js emits a real text into the rendered scene. no new code needed — the format already knew how to hold a hyperlink, it just hadn't been asked to yet. dropped one in pointing at jo's own print-preview: "the book of jo."