Instead of editing a big canvas, Substance documents are composed of content elements. While existing solutions (like Google Docs) bring traditional word-processing to the web, Substance focusses 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.

Traditional digital formats have always tried to imitate paper (think MS Word or Adobe Acrobat). We fully agree to Ted Nelson in that regard, who claims that physical paper is like a prison, constrained by 4 walls. He also states that these restrictions no longer apply to electronic documents and that they should no longer try to immitate paper.

Structured composition

Most often things work best when there are simple rules. This is why Substance cosiders documents a sequence of elements. That's it.

Content is data

Substance considers content as data, which makes them accessible to computers and allows new ways of processing them. Documents can not only be viewed, they can be queried, just like a database. Please refer to the documentation of the Substance Document module to learn how this works.