Substance.io (pictured are Oliver and Michael from Substance) is the leading solution for open source web-editing libraries. They are doing it the right way in a world where many others have failed. Unsurprisingly, it takes a lot of effort to get this right and hence an initially small, but well informed, group are working together to build a consortium around the open source project. If you would like to join the first consortium meeting it will be in Montreal on July 26 and 27.
The meeting will be of interest to those that are building, or use, editors online. To understand the importance of what they are doing it is important to understand that anytime you add any content at all through a web page you need an editor.
Substance.io is building libraries that support the building of almost any editor of this variety that you can think of and any kind of editor you have not yet thought of…. For example, just consider that when you enter content into an online spreadsheet (such as google docs) you are not actually leveraging the power of a spreadsheet – a spreadsheet is really just a table. You are actually using a powerful content editor operating ‘within’ that table without even knowing it. It’s the editor that is important, not the table. Similarly, Substance.io enables you to build the typical online editors you are used to (including as spreadsheets) but also, significantly, opens the door to innovation for online production environments.
Anywhere you want to innovate content production processes, you will need the best of breed solution. Substance.io is working to provide that for you, not by building the editors themselves, but the ‘under the hood’ libraries. These libraries enable you (us) all to leverage all that extremely difficult stuff (concurrency, source control, micro interactions, cursor placement, schemas etc) that most of us haven’t even thought about but are absolutely necessary for enabling robust editing environments.
This is naturally of interest to the publishing sector… if you are involved in the publishing of research then the meeting in Montreal is particularly interesting since a primary objective of the meeting is also to build a shared roadmap, and share the effort, for the ongoing development and maintenance of the Substance ScienceWriter (built on top of the Substance libraries).
The ScienceWriter is an editor designed for the production of scientific research materials. ScienceWriter will inevitably be the best of its class and the intention is to build collaboration amongst friends and competitors alike to solve the long- standing need for a solution of this type. Imagine sophisticated math editing, the inclusion of dynamic look-ups for references, figure support, ‘living figure’ integration, native support for JATS and HTML source formats, ORCID lookups, inline inclusion and management of new content types etc etc etc…
If this is of interest to you then your attendance will mean you will gain insights into where this product is going, have the opportunity to directly affect its development path, learn how to contribute to it, and learn how to use the product.
If you would like to learn more about what they are doing, there is a webinar on 22 June 2016. If you would like to participate in the first Consortium meeting, come on July 26 and 27 (link below).
http://substance.io/consortium/