guardian/scribe

THIS PROJECT IS DEPRECATED - You can find more information about this in our blog post, Leaving Scribe. In summary:

• We have no plans to add features to Scribe but may make critical updates throughout the period that we continue to use instances of Scribe internally
• We recommend forking the project in order to do any feature work as we will not be moving the Scribe repository out of the Guardian organisation
• In time we hope to be able to open source the new text editor we are working on

Scribe

A rich text editor framework for the web platform, with patches for browser inconsistencies and sensible defaults.

Status

Description

For an introduction, you may want to read the blog post Inside the Guardian’s CMS: meet Scribe, an extensible rich text editor.

Please note: There is a lot of missing documentation for Scribe and many of its plugins. We plan to improve this, however in the meantime we encourage you to look at the code. Scribe is very small in comparison to other libraries of its kind.

You can join us on IRC at [#scribejs] on freenode, or via the Google Group.

See an example.

Scribe only actively supports a sub-set of browsers.

Core

At the core of Scribe we have:

• Patches for many browser inconsistencies surrounding contenteditable;
• Inline and block element modes.

Patches

Scribe patches many browser inconsistencies in the native command API.

Installation

bower install scribe

Alternatively, you can access the distribution files through GitHub releases.

Usage Example

Scribe is an AMD module:

require(['scribe', 'scribe-plugin-blockquote-command', 'scribe-plugin-toolbar'],
  function (Scribe, scribePluginBlockquoteCommand, scribePluginToolbar) {
  var scribeElement = document.querySelector('.scribe');
  // Create an instance of Scribe
  var scribe = new Scribe(scribeElement);

  // Use some plugins
  scribe.use(scribePluginBlockquoteCommand());
  var toolbarElement = document.querySelector('.toolbar');
  scribe.use(scribePluginToolbar(toolbarElement));
});

You can see a live example here, or view the code here.

Also be sure to check the examples directory for an AMD syntax example as well as a CommonJS (browserify) example.

Options

allowBlockElements

Enable/disable block element mode (enabled by default)

undo: { enabled: false }

Enable/disable Scribe's custom undo manager

defaultCommandPatches

Defines which command patches should be loaded by default

defaultPlugins

Defines which of Scribe's built-in plugins should be active

defaultFormatters

Defines which of Scribe's default formatters should be active

For detailed documentation see the wiki page on options.

Architecture

• Everything is a plugin.
• No runtime dependencies.

A plugin is simply a function that receives Scribe as an argument:

function myPlugin(scribe) {}

A consumer can then use your plugin with Scribe.use:

scribe.use(myPlugin);

Plugins may package whatever functionality you desire, and you are free to use native APIs to do so. However, you are required to wrap any DOM manipulation in a transaction, so that we can capture state changes for the history. For example:

function myPlugin(scribe) {
  scribe.transactionManager.run(function () {
    // Do some fancy DOM manipulation
  });
}

Browser Support

Moved to the Github Wiki

Plugins

Scribe has a rich plugin ecosystem that expands and customises what it can do.

See the wiki for a list of plugins and how to create new ones

FAQ

See the wiki's FAQ