Substance.io launched — it's web-based document authoring and publishing

by _mql • 15 years ago

22 29 15 years ago

_mql11• 15 years ago

Source Code is at Github: https://github.com/michael/substance

This first release (0.1.0) is considered a Developer Preview. However given a webkit-based browser you should already be able to use it seriously.

moe• 15 years ago

The UI is visually pretty but confused me.

More critically, I'm still not sure what it does. Your "Learn more" blurb is way too long and put me to sleep before I reached the end of the first paragraph.

Write and annotate documents right in the browser.

Okay that part is clear, I guess. But where do the documents come from? Is this a CMS? Wiki? Some sort of community where I can also see other peoples documents? What problem are you solving? Who is your target audience? Why is all this not explained on your frontpage?

anigbrowl2• 15 years ago

Yes, I'm a little confused too. So there's basic markup in a WYSIWYG editor, and...? Maybe a short video defining the problem and presenting this as the solution would help. Right now it feels like a lightweight version of a wiki.

_mql11• 15 years ago

Sure you can compare it to a Wiki/CMS in some way. Importantly Substance is a Semantic Editor, that means you're editing Content, not the visual representation. Documents are expressed as data (as far as possible).

_mql11• 15 years ago

The prelude certainly needs to be improved, and so does the whole system. It's an open source effort, and largely driven by a one man force. This is just a first 'official' snap-shot dedicated to the developer community to get the discussion started.

To your question: It is a "Document authoring system". So documents are entered by the users themselves. It will also be some sort of community. As of now you can search for other people's documents. A technical speciality is that documents are exposed as data rather than just text. http://substance.io/documents/substance/substance. Here's more about the internals http://substance.io/#substance/substance-internals

Thanks for your points!

-- Michael

_mql11• 15 years ago

I shortened the About-Document, tried to be more concise.

http://substance.io/#substance/substance

EwanG• 15 years ago

I try to register (I would really like this to make it possible for me to work on my novel using my Android Tablet), but I keep getting an "Unknown Error".

meric• 15 years ago

How to save as pdf?

_mql11• 15 years ago

This is a planned feature. We'll use LaTeX to render proper PDF's. We'll also add images along with other content-node types.

Cossolus• 15 years ago

I think that's the most important feature, and would give your site an advantage to using a wiki. Providing/exposing 'semantic structure' in documents and separating style from structure is cool, but I don't think that's a problem that people are clamoring to have solved, anymore than it's already solved by various markup technologies.

A wiki that can exports its content as professional grade PDF files suitable for publishing would be awesome, but that's a major feature, and my humble advice would be to see if that's doable WELL before you do anything else.

I would actually be interested to know if anything already does that...

jamesjyu2• 15 years ago

Just a quick note: it took me forever to find the "Create an Account" call to action on the front page.

jamesjyu2• 15 years ago

Similarly, the new document icon in the top right corner wasn't obvious to me either.

lists• 15 years ago

Same here

_mql11• 15 years ago

Ahh you're not the first one — it's probably too big ;-). Will change that. The startpage needs some reworking.

andrenotgiant• 15 years ago

The way the site uses Embedded JS means it is completely un-crawlable for search engines. I imagine in the future a nice source of incoming traffic could be from long-tail referrals on whatever content is published, you might want to think about how googlebot crawls the site. http://www.google.com/search?q=site:substance.io&hl=en&#...

_mql11• 15 years ago

I'm aware of that. I'm going to make use of Google AJAX crawling scheme. http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/specification.h...

kondro• 15 years ago

An interesting dev release. I can see a lot of potential for this product.

Specifically I would love lawyers to start using products like this for collaborative editing of contracts (which are very tightly structured anyway). Of course there would need to be some revision history with diffs, but I'm sure that will be added to this project in time.

I don't really like the global JS functions in the server code though.

djacobs2• 15 years ago

Security concern: clicking "log in" (without a username or password) logged me in as a user called "Zyfon".

_mql11• 15 years ago

That'd be terrible. Can't reproduce it though. Which browser were you using?

djacobs2• 15 years ago

Safari 5. It's not happening any more, apparently.

jesstaa• 15 years ago

UX Epic fail. Stupid javascript urls. Seriously don't break basic web concepts.

maxogden• 15 years ago

this is awesome. thank you for spending time on the wysiwyg problem and double thank you for keeping it open source.

do you have a couch replication endpoint exposed through your api?

_mql11• 15 years ago

Not yet. You mean exposing an endpoint that allows you to replicate documents a certain user owns? Like the idea!

There's already some synchronization/replication taking place but on a higher level. That's trough Data.Graph#sync (https://github.com/michael/data) which pushes data-nodes that have been modified to the server.

chanux• 15 years ago

Substance is released under the GPLv3. That means it's free for non-commercial use.

Someone please explain this to me.

gizzlon• 15 years ago

Cool.. very cool.. IMHO the the freedom from vendor and format lock-in is your greatest advantage

Substance.io launched — it's web-based document authoring and publishing

Related Stories