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

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.

At the core of Scribe we have:

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

Scribe patches many browser inconsistencies in the native command API.

Natively, contenteditable will produce DIVs for new lines. This is not a bug. However, this is not ideal because in most cases we require semantic HTML to be produced.

Scribe overrides this behaviour to produce paragraphs (Ps; default) or BRs (with block element mode turned off) for new lines instead.

bower install scribe

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

allowBlockElements

Enable/disable block element mode (enabled by default)

defaultCommandPatches

Defines which command patches should be loaded by default

undo: { enabled: false }

Enable/disable Scribe's custom undo manager

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.

• 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
  });
}

Moved to the Github Wiki

Commands are objects that describe formatting operations. For example, the bold command.

Commands tell Scribe:

• how to format some HTML when executed (similar to document.queryCommand);
• how to query for whether the given command has been executed on the current selection (similar to document.queryCommandState);
• how to query for whether the command can be executed on the document in its current state (similar to document.queryCommandEnabled)

To ensure a separation of concerns, commands are split into multiple layers. When a command method is called by Scribe, it will be filtered through these layers sequentially.

Scribe

Where custom behaviour is defined.

Scribe Patches

Where patches for browser inconsistencies in native commands are defined.

Native

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

Yes. The Guardian is using Scribe as the basis for their internal CMS’ rich text editor.

It is likely that there will be unknown edge cases, but these will be addressed when they are discovered.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for information about running tests.

The native API for formatting content in a contenteditable has many browser inconsistencies. Scribe has to manipulate the DOM directly on top of using these commands in order to patch those inconsistencies. What’s more, there is no widely supported command for telling contenteditable to insert Ps or BRs for line breaks. Thus, to add this behaviour Scribe needs to manipulate the DOM once again.

The undo stack breaks whenever DOM manipulation is used instead of the native command API, therefore we have to use our own.

Scribe's undo manager can be turned off by configuration eg:

var scribe = new Scribe(scribeElement, {
  undo: {
    enabled: false
  }
})