Substance is an open platform for collaborative composition and sharing of digital documents.
Substance is free to use and Open Source.
This is how the Substance Composer looks for the user.
Please keep in mind Substance is a work in progress and it takes some more time to provide a solid release. However, if you can't wait and are running Mac OSX Mountain Lion, you can download this early preview.
Substance provides a flexible architecture, involving an extensible document format and protocol, collaborative features and an extensible editor.
Unlike traditional word-processors, Substance focuses on content, by leaving the layout part to the system, not the user. Because of the absence of formatting utilities, it suggests structured, content-oriented writing.
Substance considers content as data, which allows digital documents to be queried like a database. Thus processing digital documents is no longer painful.
Substance allows open collaboration. Every reader can be a potential contributor by making suggestions to the document.
Substance conists of several modules that are developed independently and can be used on its own.
Documents are exposed as data, ready to be analyzed, visualized, exported (PDF, ePub, etc.) or integrated with other applications. Additional content types (formulas, maps, etc.) can easily be added by the community.
Substance can be deployed easily. We are working on a distributed architecture that allows you to run Substance on your own computer and let it talk to other Substance nodes in a peer to peer fashion.
We’ve been developing Substance for two years now without any funding, making this a project fully built out of voluntary effort. Our goal is making Substance an open standard for interoperable digital publishing. Help us!
You can report bugs and discuss features on GitHub, on Freenode in the #_substance channel, or send tweets to @_substance.
And if that's not enough, post to our mailing list.
We just realized the more concrete our goals get, the more we see the need to spend dedicated time on development, in order to come to the day when we can say "It’s finally here!". Please help us by supporting our campaign and spread the word about it.
