Apple News Format

Apple News Format (ANF) is Apple's JSON-based article format for publishing rich content to the Apple News app. It structures content as an array of typed components (body text, headings, quotes, photos, etc.) with inline styling via separate range arrays.

Feature Mapping

ANF role / addition type	RT feature	$type
body	body → paragraph via lens	com.apple.news.facet
heading1 – heading6	heading1–heading6	com.apple.news.facet
intro	intro → paragraph via lens	com.apple.news.facet
quote, pullquote	quote / pullquote	com.apple.news.facet
aside	aside	com.apple.news.facet
author, byline	author / byline	com.apple.news.facet
caption	caption	com.apple.news.facet
inlineTextStyles bold	bold	com.apple.news.facet
inlineTextStyles italic	italic	com.apple.news.facet
inlineTextStyles underline	underline	com.apple.news.facet
inlineTextStyles strikethrough	strikethrough	com.apple.news.facet
additions link (URL)	link (attr url)	com.apple.news.facet

Position units: ANF's rangeStart / rangeLength are Unicode code-point character counts. RelationalText uses UTF-8 byte offsets. The adapter converts automatically.

Import

import { from } from 'relational-text/registry'

const article = {
  version: '1.9',
  identifier: 'article-001',
  title: 'Hello World',
  components: [
    {
      role: 'heading1',
      text: 'Hello World',
    },
    {
      role: 'body',
      text: 'This is bold text with a link.',
      inlineTextStyles: [
        { rangeStart: 8, rangeLength: 4, textStyle: { bold: true } }
      ],
      additions: [
        { type: 'link', rangeStart: 21, rangeLength: 4, URL: 'https://example.com' }
      ],
    },
  ],
}

const doc = from('applenews', article)

from('applenews', ...) also accepts a JSON string:

const doc = from('applenews', fs.readFileSync('article.json', 'utf8'))

Export

import { from, to } from 'relational-text/registry'

const doc = from('markdown', '# Hello\n\nThis is **bold**.')
const article = to('applenews', doc)
// {
//   version: '1.9',
//   components: [
//     { role: 'heading1', text: 'Hello' },
//     {
//       role: 'body',
//       text: 'This is bold.',
//       inlineTextStyles: [
//         { rangeStart: 8, rangeLength: 4, textStyle: { bold: true } }
//       ]
//     }
//   ]
// }

to('applenews', ...) accepts any document format registered in the lens graph — CommonMark, HTML, Bluesky, TipTap, etc. — and auto-translates to ANF features before export.

Supported Components

from('applenews', ...) handles these component roles: body, title, intro, heading, heading1–heading6, quote, pullquote, aside, author, byline, caption, chapter, section. section and chapter containers are recursed into — their child components are flattened into the document.

Non-text components (photo, video, divider, advertisement, etc.) are silently skipped.

Cross-Format Round-Trip

Because ANF is registered in the lens graph, you can go through RT as a hub:

import { from, to } from 'relational-text/registry'

const doc = from('applenews', article)

to('html', doc)       // render to HTML
to('markdown', doc)   // render to Markdown
to('applenews', doc)  // round-trip back to ANF

The applenews-to-relationaltext lens is invertible, so the RT → ANF path is also available via the lens graph for programmatic transforms.