Show HN: Leaflet.pub – a web app for creating and sharing rich documents

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!

My first thought was maybe the overleaf.com people had branched-out from LaTeX documents.

Have you noticed the rampant appropriation of common words of late in HN references to products? Engine. Leaflet. Bayleaf. On and on I’ve forgotten how many I’ve seen but it’s ridiculous to think that in time, they’ll all be trademarked in the US. In short, I find it an issue with no remedy at present, yet to say it’s all well and good would be a sign of ignorance.

My first thought was a new product from the LeafLetJS people, cool.

My first thought too.

(Leaflet cofounder here) - agree, code blocks is definitely on our list! Both inline and full code blocks e.g. with CodeMirror. Ideally with syntax highlighting, just need to figure out how to play nicely with our custom themes…though probably fine to start with just a default theme.

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

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!

Just one thing needs fixing, urgently: stop messing with the scrollbars! You should never take away the scrollbar unless you’re replacing it with some similar affordance (and even that’s iffy).

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.)

(Leaflet cofounder here) - thanks for sharing that, actually just finished drafting this week! It was fun to make all the different pages with different examples / themes…and also I think a nice demo of our custom domains feature :)

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!

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.

(Leaflet cofounder here) - thank you, really nice to hear! It's taken us a long time and several prior products/prototypes to arrive at this, including previous attempts where we had similar aims — make nice expressive spaces for collaboration, creative work, learning — but took very different (and more complicated) directions, e.g. a multi-room chat/note hybrid app with each project as its own database, or a global wiki with live calls built in.

I think Leaflet's by far the most easy to use but also hides a lot of power and expressive potential without being overwhelming, and we're seeing more traction and cool ways people are using, so happy with it so far! In particular finding it really cool how there's a lot of space between very simple notes/docs and rich publishing that gets closer to artifacts more like whole websites but with document-like form factor. And making something that's equally nice and simple to read and to edit/collaborate on with others…a good challenge and design space to explore!

(Leaflet cofounder here) - thanks! It's been a lot of fun trying to strike the right balance between "just docs" and things like canvas, outliner, and more interactive social blocks, as well as minimalism vs. customizability etc.

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

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.

(Leaflet cofounder here) - sorry about that! Are you seeing that with 'canvas' pages, or multiple doc pages open side by side? What device / screen size? I haven't seen issues with horizontal scroll recently but lots of trickiness with slight differences across browsers and maybe things we can improve for particular cases.

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.

That detail and then sub-sub-page preview also hooked me, great work

(Leaflet cofounder here) - much appreciated; we spent a lot of time iterating building different versions of apps before Leaflet that were more explicitly around shared social spaces and communities for learning and collaborative projects, which informed some of our aims in making Leaflets both simple docs and shared spaces (lots we can improve there e.g. bringing in live presence features!)

For the RSVP block, yes we're using Twilio - right now it automatically uses SMS for US/Canada numbers and WhatsApp for int'l, bit more cost effective…I think it wasn't a huge lift technically, though took longer than expected mainly b/c we had to wait a while / re-submit some documentation etc. for approval.

(Leaflet cofounder here) - this is a really good point! We actually had an explicit 'delete' button earlier but removed it temporarily b/c it was causing some confusion I think with people accidentally deleting collaborative docs for everyone and not just for themselves. So right now we have 'remove from home' but not full delete. We should add that back and see if we can improve the UX.

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.

You should be able to change all the colors in the theme options! As for fonts, currently working on adding options there! Probably not going to support custom icons though, but maybe an minimal mode (sans icons, maybe only text) could be interesting?

They are not and while basic privacy and security is definitely a focus (making sure random external people can't get access to your docs and account) end-to-end encryption and privacy is not. There are tools that focus on that that seem great. I think proton mail has a product in that space, and https://docs.fileverse.io/ seems interesting, and there are many more on the more notion side. We wanted to focus our efforts on the interface and experience.

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!

(Leaflet cofounder here) - thanks, and good idea! Yeah right now canvases are quite minimal, lots we can improve both with basics like selection/drag, and more types of canvas-specific blocks. We'd love to get some kind of freeform sketch block at some point too, though more complex, a few more frequently requested things we want to get to first, like simple tables and font options!

They had the licensing requirement until very recently but dropped it since they're now working on Zero (which looks awesome, but we're happy with Replicache for now). I think the docs may not be updated everywhere but see the "status" section on their homepage: https://replicache.dev/

Not right now, self hosting isn't a priority for us at the moment. It shouldn't be tooooo difficult to figure out though, the two main infrastructure dependencies are supabase and nextjs and everything else is for additional features. I should make an example .env file to make all that clear though!

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!