Doctop

A jQuery plugin for consuming Google Docs via JSON

Getting Started

Download the production version or the development version.

Create a Google Docs document, using the "Heading 1" format to denote sections of the document. Publish it to the web via File->Publish to the web->Publish.

In your web page:

<script src="jquery.js"></script>
<script src="dist/doctop.min.js"></script>
<script>
  $.doctop({
    url: 'https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_zs07o2m1BQisqWT5WEk_aC4TFl9nIZgufc9IYeL64Y/pub',
    callback: function(d){console.dir(d);},
  });
</script>

Returns:

{
  "copy": {
    "h1-1": [
      "This is a paragraph of text",
      "this is another paragraph",
      "h2-1" [
        "this should be a child of h2-1, which should be a child of h1-1",
        "h3-1": [
          "This should be a child of h3-1, which should be a child of h2-1"
        ]
      ]
    ],
    "h1-2": [
      "This should be a child of h1-2, which itself should be in the top level of the object.",
      "h3-2": [
        "This should be a child of h3-2, which should be a child of h1-2"
      ]
    ],
    "h1-3": [
      "This should be a child of h1-3",
      "Another child of h1-3"
    ]
  }
}

Documentation

### Options

url (required)

The full URL of a published Google Doc. In Google Docs, go "File->Publish to the Web->Publish" to get this URL.

callback (required)

Asynchronous callback for the data. Takes one argument, the response, containing copy and any Tabletop data. The this context is the contents of response.copy.

tabletop_url (default: undefined)

If you have Tabletop.js included on the page, you can supply a published Google Sheets URL in order to only need one callback. The Tabletop response will be in the "data" key of the returned object, i.e, spreadsheet data in data.data, Tabletop object in data.tabletop.

tabletop_proxy (default: undefined)

If you're using Tabletop with Doctop, you can specify the Tabletop proxy here. Note this only works for Google Sheets that have been copied to S3 or elsewhere; Doctop proxy support is still forthcoming.

tabletop_simplesheet (default: false)

Use Tabletop's "simpleSheet" method when grabbing that data. This only really works if you only have one sheet.

simpleKeys (default: false)

Instead of creating keys for the sections that are the slugified version of the H1 text, return keys in the format section_0 — this may be desirable if you have journalists who enjoy arbitrarily changing the H1 text on you!

preserveFormatting (default: true)

This will attempt to preserve text formatting from Google Docs. It will yield messier output because Google Docs loves to wrap everything under the sun in a <span> tag. Defaults to false.

~~returnJquery (default: false)~~ DEPRECIATED in 1.0.0

~~This returns non-H1 elements as jQuery objects instead of either HTML or text.~~

Examples

(Coming soon)

Roadmap/ToDos

• Add the preserveFormatting option
• Add support for other heading tags (h2-6)
• Unit tests all up in hurr / up in hurr

Release History

1.0.0 - First stable release. Adds preserveFormatting option and tests; removes returnJquery.

0.0.2 - Adds more Tabletop features.

0.0.1 — Initial release.