RelationalText

Appearance

RelationalTextStructured annotations for any document format

A document model built on panproto that preserves semantic meaning across editors, protocols, and representations.

Try the Demo
Get Started

Semantic Annotations

Typed inline annotations that survive format conversion — not just bold and italic, but ingredients, mentions, coordinates, and any structured data.

Built on panproto

Cross-format conversion powered by panproto's algebraic lens engine. Declarative JSON lenses compose, invert, and migrate — with provably correct schema evolution.

Learn about panproto

WASM-Powered Parsing

30+ format adapters compiled from Rust to WebAssembly. Ship a WASM blob and a lexicon and a new format joins the conversion graph.

WARNING

This documentation is nearly fully LLM-generated. Proceed with caution. We appreciate any suggestions or reports of issues at github.com/relationaltext/relationaltext.

How it works ​

Every text format — Markdown, ProseMirror, Quill, Bluesky, Notion — can be understood as a vocabulary of typed annotations over a text sequence. Converting between formats is remapping vocabularies. RelationalText makes that conversion infrastructure first-class.

The core insight: documents are UTF-8 text plus byte-ranged facets (typed annotations). Each facet carries features identified by NSIDs — the same namespace system used by AT Protocol — so the vocabulary of annotations is as open as the web itself.

The panproto engine ​

Format conversion is powered by panproto, an engine for schematic version control built on generalized algebraic theories. RelationalText uses panproto at every layer:

  • Schema representation — format lexicons (JSON Schema, ATProto Lexicon, and others) are parsed into panproto's algebraic schema model
  • Lens compilation — declarative JSON lens rules compile to panproto protolens chains: rename, drop, add, pullback, and directed equations
  • Migration — panproto computes provably correct migrations between schema versions, so format evolution is tractable in both directions
  • Instance transformation — documents convert to panproto instances, transform through the lens chain, and convert back

This means a v1 document upgrades to v2 transparently, and a v2 document still round-trips to v1 wherever the mapping is lossless.

Why it matters ​

Once annotated text is treated as first-class infrastructure, the possibilities compound. Collaborative editing is CRDT-safe. Any byte range can carry typed semantic annotations — not just a hyperlink, but a mention with a handle, a place with coordinates, a product with an ID. Lenses decouple intent from rendering, so "embed a YouTube video here" can mean a player, a thumbnail, a transcript, or a bare link depending on context. Documents store their original format's features as a permanent namespace alongside the normalized hub representation, making backward-compatible re-import always possible.

Ship a WASM blob and a lexicon JSON and a new format joins the shared conversion graph without permission or coordination.