@remirror/extension-annotation

This extension allows to annotate the content in your editor

Installation

# yarn
yarn add @remirror/extension-annotation

# pnpm
pnpm add @remirror/extension-annotation

# npm
npm install @remirror/extension-annotation

This is included by default when you install the recommended remirror package. All exports are also available via the entry-point, remirror/extensions.

Usage

The following code creates an instance of this extension.

import { AnnotationExtension } from 'remirror/extensions';

const extension = new AnnotationExtension();

Background

Annotation enrich parts of a document. For example, a user could annotate a sentence as "important" to find it back later on.

Annotations differ from marks in that they can span across multiple Prosemirror nodes. Prosemirror stores all content in a flat sequence of nodes. For example, the text "bold italic bold" contains 3 different nodes (italic splits the node) - not as one bold node with an italic sub node. In contrast, one annotation could covered the whole text with multiple nodes. This is relevant if you want to show a list of sentences marked as "important" or if you want to allow users to rename the "important" annotation (which otherwise would have to be done in all nodes).

Overlapping annotations

Annotations can be partially or fully overlapping. For example, a user could annotate the "important" sentence as well with "to be reviewed" or a word in the sentence as "customer X".

The annotation extension provides logic to visualize such overlapping annotations by mixing colors. See storybook for an example.

Extendable data model

The extension defines only the minimal required fields: position where the annotation starts/ends and an ID. For convince, the annotation provides also the text covered by the annotation.

An app using the annotation-extension can extend the base data model. For example, it could add a label (like "important") or a color to each annotation. The annotation extension will pass these custom fields simply through to the app.

Collaborative editing (yjs)

Annotations are a separate data structure, next to the Prosemirror document, and are therefore not shared via Remirror's yjs-extension. The annotation-extension provides its own support for collaborative editing via yjs.