Show HN: Leaflet.pub – a web app for creating and sharing rich documents
35 comments
·March 5, 2025jofer
Just as an FYI: "leaflet" is the name of a popular web mapping JS library. https://leafletjs.com/
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.
jpereira
Leaflet looks like an amazing library. We only came across it and the naming collision after we got started, and so far haven't had too much confusion, but definitely a good idea to be aware when we do an SDK. Would love to make the confusion worse by including a map block in leaflet.pub via leafletjs someday though!
ks2048
My first thought was maybe the overleaf.com people had branched-out from LaTeX documents.
ricardonunez
My first thought was a new product from the LeafLetJS people, cool.
nsriv
Still playing around with it but I have to say, I absolutely adore the side-scrolling feature!
jpereira
In our last product (hyperlink.academy) we went through a lot of iterations on multipage designs, from carousels, to stacking decks, to a kind of 2-pane view, and eventually settled on the side scrolling view. Really useful for drilling down into things, looking at things side-by-side, etc. Glad to hear you like it!
vladsanchez
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
breadchris
I love this a lot. I have spent a great deal of time considering digital document writing. The hybrid of document and canvas is a must and is commonly found in PKMs now (obsidian, logseq, affine). Collaboration features are also a must imo, but not often found due to it being difficult to implement and scale.
Looking forward to tracking this project! Is there a community one could join to get updates?
gazook89
It'd be great to get code blocks and inline code blocks. Ideally using Markdown syntax. And, if possible to get syntax highlighting, that'd be even better.
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.
amendegree
I see its source available, which implies you’re planning on monetizing somehow, do you mind sharing any insight into what that would look like?
I’m always weary of getting involved in a new tool only for the rug pull to happen later.
jpereira
Very fair question! Honestly the main reason it's source available rn instead of open source is we haven't decided on a license internally, as opposed to business reasons. As for monetization, the two areas we're exploring are publication, subscriptions to blogs, a la substack, and a "pro" tier, with better tools for managing lots of documents.
layer8
Some feedback:
– 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.
jpereira
Super helpful thanks!
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.
holistio
Kudos for the multiple ProseMirror instances. I'm building with ProseMirror myself and that's some nice wizardry I haven't thought of.
kaizenb
Very nice work!
crossroadsguy
Is it supposed to be a permanent published document? I couldn't find a delete/unpublish option. I guess retaining the first randomly generated URL can be used to delete the content, but still there is no clear way to delete, unpublish.
sno6
Guys, this is super cool. As someone building a canvas product that also has a (prosemirror) notepad I am super inspired by this. The way you can flick from a canvas on the notepad, back to the notepad, and it doesn't feel like you're locked in to any block because you can still slightly see where you came from.. love it.
All the best!
cetra3
I can't seem to scroll horizontally very easily, like I have to middle click drag in empty space, is there any reason you are hiding scrollbars?
pazimzadeh
I like the icons.
Can you edit a button after adding it?
jpereira
Unfortunately not yet, we haven't come up with a pattern we like for that yet, just added buttons quite recently. Right now the move is to delete and re-add, which I know is annoying. Will improve soon!
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 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!