okfn / Textus

Textus is an open-source platform for presenting and working with cultural and historical texts.

As of March 2013 Textus is undergoing a substantial refactor into smaller components. Please see the website for details.

Textus represents the evolution of more than 6 years of software development, building as it does on the OpenShakspeare platform (which powered http://openshakespeare.org from 2005 until 2011) and the OpenCorrespondence system (which powered http://opencorrespondence.org since 2009).

Components

The Textus Platform is now being refactored composed of 4 separate components:

• Textus Formatter - this tool converts standard text formats to the Textus format
• Textus Viewer - this is a pure Javascript + HTML app that displays a text in Textus Format
• Textus Wordpress - a plugin that uses the other Textus tools to turn Wordpress into a platform for hosting, presenting and collaborating on cultural texts
• Textus API - create an API for texts in Textus format

Note these components are under active development as of December 2013.

Quick getting started guide

This is the version on beta.openphilosophy.org:

• Install Node.js and NPM (Node Package Manager) and ElasticSearch
• Configure and run an ElasticSearch server, making note of the connection protocol, port and host.
• In a shell:
  • git clone git://github.com/okfn/textus.git
  • cd textus
  • npm install
  • node src/server.js --help
• Call node src/server.js with appropriate options (see the message returned from the help option)
• Point your web browser at localhost on whatever port you've configured for Textus (defaults to 8080 if not specified).

Copyright and License

Copyright 2011-2013 Open Knowledge Foundation

Licensed under the MIT License:

A copy of the license can be found in the LICENSE file