Squire is an HTML5 rich text editor, which provides powerful cross-browser normalisation, whilst being supremely lightweight and flexible. It is built for the present and the future, and as such does not support truly ancient browsers. It should work fine back to around Opera 10, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 9 and IE8.
Unlike other HTML5 rich text editors, Squire was written as a component for writing documents (emails, essays, etc.), not doing wysiwyg websites. If you are looking for support for inserting form controls or flash components or the like, you'll need to look elsewhere. However for many purposes, Squire may be just what you need, providing the power without the bloat. The key features are:
- Only 9KB of JS after minification and gzip (27KB before gzip).
- IE8 support does not add extra bloat to the core library; instead, a separate 3KB (7KB before gzip) file patches the browser to support the W3C APIs.
- Does not include its own XHR wrapper, widget library or lightbox overlays.
- No dependencies.
- No UI for a toolbar is supplied, allowing you to integrate seamlessly with the
rest of your application and lose the bloat of having two UI toolkits loaded.
Instead, you get a component you can drop in in place of a
<textarea>and manipulate programatically.
Squire provides an engine that handles the heavy work for you, making it easy to
add extra features. With the changeFormat method you can easily add or remove any inline formatting you wish. And the modifyBlocks method can be used to make complicated block-level changes in a relatively easy manner.
If you need more commands than in the simple API, I suggest you check out the source code (it's not very long), and see how a lot of the other API methods are implemented in terms of these two methods.
The general philosophy of Squire is to allow the browser to do as much as it can (which unfortunately is not very much), but take control anywhere it deviates from what is required, or there are significant cross-browser differences. As such, the document.execCommand method is not used at all; instead all formatting is done via custom functions, and certain keys, such as 'enter' and 'backspace' are handled by the editor.
- Copy the contents of the
build/directory onto your server. - Edit the
<style>block in document.html to add the default styles you would like the editor to use (or link to an external stylesheet). - In your application, instead of a
<textarea>, use an<iframe src="path/to/document.html">. - In your JS, attach an event listener to the
loadevent of the iframe. When this fires you can grab a reference to the editor object throughiframe.contentWindow.editor. - Use the API below with the
editorobject to set and get data and integrate with your application or framework.
Squire is released under the MIT license. See License.txt for full license.
Attach an event listener to the editor. The handler can be either a function or an object with a handleEvent method. This function or method will be called whenever the event fires, with an event object as the sole argument. The following events may be observed:
- focus: The editor gained focus.
- blur: The editor lost focus
- keydown: Standard DOM keydown event.
- keypress: Standard DOM keypress event.
- keyup: Standard DOM keyup event.
- input: The user inserted, deleted or changed the style of some text; in other words, the result for
editor.getHTML()will have changed. - pathChange: The path (see getPath documentation) to the cursor has changed. The new path is available as the
pathproperty on the event object. - select: The user selected some text.
- undoStateChange: The availability of undo and/or redo has changed. The event object has two boolean properties,
canUndoandcanRedoto let you know the new state. - willPaste: The user is pasting content into the document. The content that will be inserted is available as the
fragmentproperty on the event object. You can modify this fragment in your event handler to change what will be pasted. You can also call thepreventDefaulton the event object to cancel the paste operation.
- type: The event to listen for. e.g. 'focus'.
- handler: The callback function to invoke
Returns self.
Remove an event listener attached via the addEventListener method.
- type: The event type the handler was registered for.
- handler: The handler to remove.
Returns self.
Focuses the editor.
Returns self.
Removes focus from the editor
Returns self.
Returns the document object of the editable area. May be useful to do transformations outside the realm of the API.
Returns the HTML value of the editor in its current state. This value is equivalent to the contents of the <body> tag and does not include any surrounding boilerplate.
Sets the HTML value for the editor. The value supplied should not contain <body> tags or anything outside of that.
- html: The html to set.
Returns self.
Returns the text currently selected in the editor.
Inserts an image at the current cursor location.
- src: The source path for the image.
Returns a reference to the newly inserted image element.
Returns the path through the DOM tree from the <body> element to the current current cursor position. This is a string consisting of the tag, id and class names in CSS format. For example BODY>BLOCKQUOTE>DIV#id>STRONG>SPAN.font>EM. If a selection has been made, so different parts of the selection may have different paths, the value will be (selection). The path is useful for efficiently determining the current formatting for bold, italic, underline etc, and thus determining button state. If a selection has been made, you can has the hasFormat method instead to get the current state for the properties you care about.
Returns a W3C Range object representing the current selection/cursor position.
Changes the current selection/cursor position.
- range: The W3C Range object representing the desired selection.
Returns self.
Undoes the most recent change.
Returns self.
If the user has just undone a change, this will reapply that change.
Returns self.
Queries the editor for whether a particular format is applied anywhere in the current selection.
- tag: The tag of the format
- attributes: (optional) Any attributes the format.
Returns true if any of the selection is contained within an element with the specified tag and attributes, otherwise returns false.
Makes any non-bold currently selected text bold (by wrapping it in a <strong> tag).
Returns self.
Makes any non-italic currently selected text italic (by wrapping it in an <em> tag).
Returns self.
Makes any non-underlined currently selected text underlined (by wrapping it in a <u> tag).
Returns self.
Removes any bold formatting from the selected text.
Returns self.
Removes any italic formatting from the selected text.
Returns self.
Removes any underline formatting from the selected text.
Returns self.
Makes the currently selected text a link. If no text is selected, the URL or email will be inserted as text at the current cursor point and made into a link.
- url: The url or email to link to.
Returns self.
Removes any link that is currently at least partially selected.
Returns self.
Sets the font face for the selected text.
- font: A comma-separated list of fonts (in order of preference) to set.
Returns self.
Sets the font size for the selected text.
- size: A size to set. Any CSS size value is accepted, e.g. '13px', or 'small'.
Returns self.
Sets the colour of the selected text.
- colour: The colour to set. Any CSS colour value is accepted, e.g. '#f00', or 'hsl(0,0,0)'.
Returns self.
Sets the colour of the background of the selected text.
- colour: The colour to set. Any CSS colour value is accepted, e.g. '#f00', or 'hsl(0,0,0)'.
Returns self.
Sets the text alignment in all blocks at least partially contained by the selection.
- alignment: The direction to align to. Can be 'left', 'right', 'center' or 'justify'.
Returns self.
Sets the text direction in all blocks at least partially contained by the selection.
- direction: The text direction. Can be 'ltr' or 'rtl'.
Returns self.
Executes a function on each block in the current selection, or until the function returns a truthy value.
- fn The function to execute on each block node at least partially contained in the current selection. The function will be called with the block node as the only argument.
- mutates A boolean indicating whether your function may modify anything in the document in any way.
Returns self.
Extracts a portion of the DOM tree (up to the block boundaries of the current selection), modifies it and then reinserts it and merges the edges. See the code for examples if you're interested in using this function.
- modify The function to apply to the extracted DOM tree; gets a document fragment as a sole argument. Should return the node or fragment to be reinserted in the DOM.
Returns self.
Increases by 1 the quote level (number of <blockquote> tags wrapping) all blocks at least partially selected.
Returns self.
Decreases by 1 the quote level (number of <blockquote> tags wrapping) all blocks at least partially selected.
Returns self.
Changes all at-least-partially selected blocks to be part of an unordered list.
Returns self.
Changes all at-least-partially selected blocks to be part of an ordered list.
Returns self.
Changes any at-least-partially selected blocks which are part of a list to no longer be part of a list.
Returns self.