[HN Gopher] Show HN: Leaflet.pub - a web app for creating and sh...
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Show HN: Leaflet.pub - a web app for creating and sharing rich
documents
Hi HN! For the last 8 months we've been working on leaflet.pub, a
web app for making delightful documents. We're trying to strike a
balance between Notion and Google Docs -- very fast, ultralight and
easy to share, but also supporting rich blocks and multiple pages.
Weirdly, none of the many notetaking/document apps that we could
find hit this combination, so we made Leaflet. With it you can: -
Instantly create a doc, without an account - Share read and edit
links - Sign-in with email to sync your docs to different devices -
Add rich blocks, like canvases, subpages, rsvps, and polls It's
really useful for one-off collaborations, running events, or just
when you need a blank page without having to buy into a whole
organizational system. We also spent a lot of time making sure
Leaflets look good. We've found that there's a pretty blurry
boundary between a document and a website, so making something that
people can feel proud to publish online was key. Here's a couple
examples! - Jake's presentation on Slojd, traditional handcraft
pedagogy (https://leaflet.pub/3d28b4a7-3703-4ae5-aaf6-d270ffe1151f)
- Laura's documentation of her website redesign
(https://leaflet.pub/14aba696-e894-440a-9d06-917641a2bfce) Some
technical details that might be interesting: - We do sync and all
our client-side state via Replicache, which I really love! - Data
is modeled as a set of facts about entities, a la Datomic, forming
a graph. This has been flexible enough for us to quickly build new
features, like canvases and nested pages, without committing to a
single document structure. - We use ProseMirror, but not for the
entire document. Instead every text block is a separate ProseMirror
instance. This lets us keep the document structure in our database
and our schema, without having to dive into ProseMirror's every
time we want to modify things. Our (somewhat messy) source is
available here: https://github.com/hyperlink-academy/leaflet if you
want to dig deeper! On the horizon: - Better home and document
organizing features -- things like search, tagging, collections
etc. - We're really excited about ATProto and Bluesky and are
working on a set of lexicons and an AppView for document
publishing! This will include a lexicon for rich text documents, as
well as one publications, and some concept of memberships or
subscriptions. - More blocks! Tables, code blocks, etc. Some
things we're particularly proud of: - Our list handling - Custom
theming - Keyboard handling on iOS Safari (and generally works
excellently on mobile) - Side-scrolling multi-page interface -
Works as a PWA! Some things that still need work: - While faster
than others, still a lot of work we can do on performance, both
speed when working with very large documents and loading docs
generally - Drag and drop and selection in general could be a lot
nicer - Keyboard navigation across multiple pages - Multiplayer
cursors, and generally real-time sync could be sped up greatly
leveraging CRDTs (we already use YJS, just could move updates
around faster) You can create a new document just by visiting
https://leaflet.pub (or https://leaflet.pub/new if you're signed
in) -- would love to hear your thoughts and any feedback if you
give it a try!
Author : jpereira
Score : 29 points
Date : 2025-03-05 17:55 UTC (5 hours ago)
| nsriv wrote:
| Still playing around with it but I have to say, I absolutely
| _adore_ the side-scrolling feature!
| vladsanchez wrote:
| Reminds me of https://gingkowriter.com/ ... Side scrolling and
| spatial notetaking was the two reasons to stick with it.
| Perhaps it's time to switch to Leaflet.
|
| Thanks for sharing <3
| pwillia7 wrote:
| This is really great -- Thanks for making it.
| ftr1200 wrote:
| This is fantastic. Good job. Makes you realise how much clutter
| is out there (SaaS nonsense, ads, paywalls, bullshit).
|
| Loading the landing page was a breathe of fresh air. Thank you.
| jayloofah wrote:
| Are the documents encrypted? Is privacy a focus? One major reason
| that people want to move away from Google Docs and Notion is
| because of their very invasive privacy policies.
| sabellito wrote:
| That's very impressive, super slick. The subpage preview on the
| parent page works so well I went digging into the source code.
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