Photoshop for Text

Photoshop for text — Stephan Ango

• When I think about editing images, many options come to mind: contrast, saturation, sharpening, blur, airbrush, clone stamp, etc. Even basic image editors offer dozens of useful image manipulation tools
• When I think about editing text, a much narrower definition comes to mind: cut, copy, paste, find, replace, spell check — nothing that modifies the totality of the writing. This is changing
• Up until now, text editors have been focused on input. The next evolution of text editors will make it easy to alter, summarize and lengthen text. You'll be able to do this for entire documents, not just individual sentences or paragraphs
• Text filters will allow you to paraphrase text so that you can easily switch between prose styles: literary, technical, journalistic, legal, and more. You will be able to easily change an entire story chapter from first-person to third-person narration or transform narrative descriptions into dialogue
• In some ways, it is surprising that filtering text is technically challenging. The text seems easier to manipulate than images. But languages have far more rules than images do
• A reader expects writing to follow proper spelling and grammar, a consistent tone, and a logical sequence of sentences
• I'm excited to see community efforts like Obsidian Ava driving in this direction.