Improving recipe formatting
It's currently difficult to write out "modernist"-style recipes in the recipes tab. See the following example from Modernist Cuisine:
It doesn't seem possible to create tables without resorting to ugly HTML. Is there any way this could be made easier in the editor? Perhaps by supplying a CSS class that could let us avoid lots of style=".." attributes in the tags?
The key formatting features here are:
- The title ("Omelet Base")
- The yield (300g)
- The four primary columns: Ingredient, Quantity, Scaling, and Procedure
- For each "step", the Procedure column spans all rows in that step.
- Numbering is monotonic through each recipe (can be done in CSS with custom counters)
1 answer
I have also brought this up before (albeit titled differently and asking about tags too).
I would like to see some more structures to our recipes as well. As of now, formatting is your own choice which means that you do what you think is the best (which doesn't need to be wrong). However, everyone doing the best leads to inconsistency which makes finding the right recipe, the instructions in a recipe or ingredients harder.
For example, right now few recipes provide information about cooking time but this information is often very relevant. Think about users searching for a quick and dirty recipe to dish out something fast. Or the ones looking for a recipe with increased cooking time to cook with friends.
In my opinion, it would be best to change the articles post type for cooking to ensure consistency and uniformity among posts. Instead of a providing information freely, there should be text boxes for instructions, yield, ingredients and other information where one, for example, can write up features of the dish. This could take the form you propose but not as image but rather as HTML so screen readers can read it and it adapts to varied display size.
All in all, I would like to see this implemented and improved as you propose but it's not mandatory for the site to function so I guess we will have to be patient until it's our turn to discuss it further and implement it.
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