Show HN: Leaflet.pub – a web app for creating and sharing rich documents
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 Slöjd, 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!
60 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] threadThanks for sharing <3
This really is a big deal. It leads to people flat-out missing that things are scrollable. Even after I noticed it was doing that in one of the demos, I missed the scrolled content in the other demo for a while.
This needs two changes: firstly, ditch the .no-scrollbar class; secondly, on your .overflow-y-scroll and .overflow-x-scroll, replace the value ‘scroll’ with ‘auto’. (It’s a case of bad naming, compounded by the advent of overlay scrollbars which make it easy to miss that it’s forcing scrollbars, not merely allowing scrollbars, and inconsistent with almost all of the rest of CSS in that a value named ‘auto’ is not the default. ‘scroll’ has only ever had approximately three rare but semi-legitimate use-cases, and at least two of them were rendered obsolete with the advent of the ‘scrollbar-gutter’ property. My personal opinion is that `overflow: scroll` should be officially deprecated, linters should error on it, and browsers should even consider replacing it with `overflow: auto` as an intervention.)
Loading the landing page was a breathe of fresh air. Thank you.
All that being said, I'd love at some point to manage to get everything end-to-end encrypted, but it'll be a big lift!
It's definitely possible to do all if this in a p2p context, but it's much harder and increases the complexity a ton. It also makes it harder to be fast, you're naturally increasing the amount that needs to be done client side, and server rendering is out the door. There's a bunch of client-side editors that I think are great, and end-to-end encryption is definitely something I want to work towards, but it's out of scope for us right now.
Btw some parts still incomplete e.g. I want to eventually fill out more detail on each page re: how Leaflet compares to other tools, and add more examples and templates. If anyone makes good ones they'd like to share publicly, glad to add!
I’m always weary of getting involved in a new tool only for the rug pull to happen later.
Re: scrollbars honestly we just like the cleaner minimalist look and have gotten used to it but I hear you (+ others) that it can be annoying, we'll look into improving.
May or may not be relevant for you (and is definitely a very different field/product), but if you're releasing client libraries/SDKs of any sort, it might be good to be aware of. There's a large ecosystem of plugin libraries named "leaflet-foo" or "foo-leaflet" etc in addition to the "main" one. If you start releasing any libraries to work with your app (even if they're not JS), you'll likely want to be aware of and work around naming collisions for library names.
Either way, looks nifty!! I love the approach and we need more people willing to do something like this that competes with google docs / etc, but does so by targeting a specific use case / niche / etc and not by trying to do everything.
I wish canvases had edges connecting nodes
All the best!
But otherwise, this pretty well lines up with an idea that I had just been mulling over in the last 2 days. Which is pretty eery, but well timed. Realistically I wasn't ever going to do it, so I'm glad I may not have to miss out.
Is there a tutorial for how to self-host it?
– When tapping on the leaflet icon in the bottom left, the whole text area is erased (Safari on iPad).
– The strikethrough icon is a bit hard to recognize, because the stroke merges with the S line. Some text editors use a different letter for that reason, for example a T, and add a small gap along both sides of the stroke to emphasize the overlay (only on the icon, not on the actual text being edited).
– Making the strikethrough line lighter than the text color is a bit unconventional, I’m not sure it helps readability. In the default text size, the line is easy to overlook, also because it is pretty thin (on a hi-DPI display). This is particularly the case on bold and/or italic text.
– No dark mode support, it seems.
The leaflet icon is our little watermark (which can be disabled!). Just updated it to point to https://about.leaflet.pub instead of just leaflet.pub, it was just creating a new doc every time you clicked it.
Useful feedback on strikethrough! Will review our implementation of it.
As for dark mode, you can theme your documents, and use existing documents as templates for others, so you can get dark mode that way. We could do a lot to make it easier to share and get basic themes though.
Right now all docs are unlisted but anyone with the link can view; we're also thinking about fully private or password protected docs (several people have asked about this) but still exploring the best approach there.
Looking forward to tracking this project! Is there a community one could join to get updates?
Yes, for updates we have a newsletter here…so far sending alpha updates every week or two; may have to move it to 'beta' soon! https://buttondown.com/leaflet
Can you edit a button after adding it?
my only nitpick at this moment: i like to see my scrollbars on a desktop