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After three years of ProseMirror, I replaced its view layer to get real pagination

DEV Community: frontend·king·about 6 hours ago
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Open https://quirekit.com and the first thing you see is not a screenshot. It's an editor with actual pages: type, press Enter, watch a table split across a page break, switch between Canvas and SVG rendering. All live.

I've been building ProseMirror-based products for three years. The request I could never really deliver was "can it paginate like Word / Google Docs?" In June I gave up on working around it and started over. Four months later that turned into QuireKit , and the open-source parts are MIT.

The problem with contenteditable and pages

The browser is great at laying out one endless page. It has no idea about sheets of paper: where a paragraph should break, which table row moves to the next page, what the page number is.

The usual trick is to let the browser lay out, measure heights, and cut the result into pages afterwards. It works for a demo. Then the content changes and everything has to be re-measured and re-cut, and the caret and selection have to follow your fake page structure around.…

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