DSKEDTR makes things to print or share as a PDF: newsletters, flyers, posters, programs, booklets. Here is a newsletter from start to finish.
1. Start
Pick New document (a Letter page) or Start from a template when DSKEDTR opens, or explore the sample. The New button in the top bar offers the same: a blank page, a blank page of any size, or a template (a flyer, a newsletter, a tri-fold brochure, a certificate, a greeting card, a sign or a monthly calendar), each an original design with sample words to replace. Building blocks on the rail (K) add ready-made pieces to any page: a pull quote, a sidebar, a coupon, event details, a masthead, a contact strip, a page border, and a calendar for any month (a real table, with the days of the week as its header row). Lists: the Paragraph section's List buttons (or Ctrl+Shift+8 and 7) make bullets or numbers, which renumber themselves; Tab at the start of an item moves it in a level. Superscript and subscript (x², H₂O) are in Characters (Ctrl+. and Ctrl+,). Find and replace (Ctrl+F, or the button beside Undo and Redo) searches every page. Words the dictionary doesn't know get a red wavy line (never printed); right-click one for suggestions, or press F7 to check the whole document. Names and terms you add are saved inside the document. Size, orientation and margins can change any time: Page setup, in the Document section of the Inspector. The Colour scheme button there swaps the document's six colours in one step (a template comes in its own scheme), and every colour field in the Inspector offers the scheme's six as swatches. Changing the size never squashes what is on the page. For a booklet or magazine, tick Facing pages there: pages 2 and 3, 4 and 5 and so on show side by side as spreads, with inside and outside margins. View (the eye in the top bar) shows one page, two pages side by side, or all pages at once (click one to work on it, or drag one to move it), and Preview (W): the page as it will print, with the rest of the window shaded. Click the other page of a spread to work on it, or drag something across to move it there. Bleed lets colour and pictures run past the edge for trimming; the Export dialog adds the bleed and crop marks to the PDF. Folds, also in Page setup, mark where a brochure or card will be folded (half, tri-fold, Z, gate, quarter or tent). The Export dialog can also arrange the pages as a booklet (two pages on each side of a sheet, in folding order: print on both sides, fold and staple) or as two or four copies on a sheet with cut marks. Rulers, the grid, guides and snapping turn on and off in the top bar; with nothing picked, the Inspector's Guides and grid section has them all, with the guides' exact places, quick sets and column guides. Drag out of a ruler onto the page to make a guide.
Publisher files
Open (Ctrl+O, or drop it on the window) also opens Microsoft Publisher files (.pub, from Publisher 2000 to today). Pages, text boxes with their words and formatting, tables, pictures (clip art and equations too), shapes, lines, groups and master pages come across as things you can edit. A .pub doesn't carry its fonts. Times New Roman, Arial, Calibri, Cambria, Georgia and Courier New have built-in twins with the same letter widths; any other font is listed as missing, with a built-in one standing in. Add it in Document, Your fonts: its file, this computer's copy, or a match from Google Fonts (only when you ask: just the font's name is sent, and the font is then saved inside the project). A short report says what came across and what didn't. Save it as a DSKEDTR project to keep working on it; the .pub itself is never changed. Publisher 98 and older files can't be opened yet.
2. Text boxes, and text that flows
Pick the Text box tool (T) and drag on the page. Type. Headings are paragraph roles: Heading 1, Heading 2, Body and Caption, in the Inspector's Paragraph section (or Ctrl+Alt+1, 2, 0, 9). Below the role is its style: size, line and letter spacing, kerning, space above and below, indents (left, right, and the first line: in, or hanging out for "a)" and "1." lists), alignment and colour. Changing it changes every paragraph with that role, so all your headings stay alike. When a box is too full, a red + appears. Click or tap the round chain-link tab just below its bottom-right corner (or Link in the floating pill), then click an empty text box, even on another page: the text carries on there. Unlink in the pill stops the flow again. A text box can also split into columns (up to six, with the gap you choose): Text flow, in the Inspector. Text can follow a curve: an arch, a dip or a circle (Shape of the text, in Text flow); it straightens while you type in it. A story can start with a drop cap (its first letter, two to five lines tall): Story, in the Inspector. Long words can break with a hyphen at the ends of lines: Hyphenate, in a role's style in Paragraph (English documents). For a price list, a program or a form, put a tab between the words (Insert, Tab, or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+T) and set tab stops for the paragraph's role in Paragraph: left, centred or right, or right at the edge, with dots or a line leading up to them. The text fills one column, then the next, then the next linked box.
3. Pictures and shapes
The Picture tool (F) adds a picture, or drop one on the page. DSKEDTR asks for its alt text straight away. Rectangles (R), ellipses (O) and lines (L) are decoration unless you give them alt text. Overlapping shapes can be merged (Arrange, in the Inspector). To cut a picture to a shape, put the shape over it where you want the cut, pick both, and choose Crop to shape in the floating pill (or Alt+Shift+P). An empty picture frame on a master page is a placeholder: on each page that uses the master, double-click it or drop a picture on it to give that page its own picture (the Document section lists them too).
Tables
The Table tool (B) draws a table: drag for one that size, or click for one that fits its words. Type in a cell; Tab goes to the next one, row by row. Each row grows to fit what is in it. The Inspector's Table section adds and deletes rows and columns (beside the cell you are typing in), turns the header row and banded rows on or off, and sets their colours; Look sets the lines. While you type in a cell, the floating pill above the table inserts a row above or below it, or a column left or right of it, or deletes its row or column. Drag the line between two columns, or the green tab above it, to change their widths; drag the line under a row to make it taller. While you type in a cell, the Table section can merge it with the cell to its right or below it (and split it again), colour the cell, its row or its column, set its row's height, and move that row and the ones below it to the next page (for a table too long for one page, with its header row repeated). "Words in the cells" puts them at the top, in the middle or at the bottom. Screen readers read a table's cells row by row, and the header row tells them what each column holds.
4. Pages
The filmstrip along the bottom shows every page. + adds one after the page showing (with master pages, it asks which one the new page uses). Click or tap a page for its buttons: move it left or right, its master page, duplicate, copy, cut, paste, delete. You can also drag pages into order, or use Alt with Left or Right. Shift+click picks a run of pages and Ctrl+click (Cmd+click) one more, and the buttons then work on all of them. Copied pages paste after any page, in this document or another one (their master pages, pictures and fonts come too). For a booklet, tick Facing pages in Document (or Booklet in the View menu): page 1 sits on its own, then 2 and 3 side by side.
5. Reading order
Screen readers read each page in its reading order: the Reading order section of the Inspector, or the Reading order tool (N), where you click things in the order they should be read.
Check it
The Accessibility tab beside the Inspector (or the person button in the top bar, which shows how many problems there are) lists what to fix: a missing title, missing alt text, text too faint against what is behind it, text that doesn't fit, and more. Each has a button that goes straight to it. It can also show the page as someone with colour blindness or blurred vision sees it.
6. Save and share
Save project (Ctrl+Shift+S, or the last choice in Export) keeps everything editable in a .dskedtr file, with the pictures inside (as the pictures themselves, so the file is no bigger than it needs to be; it is a zip, so any zip tool can look inside). Export (Ctrl+S) makes a PDF of every page for printing or sharing, a PNG picture of one page, or an accessible web page: one HTML file that reflows to any screen and reads well with a screen reader. The PDF is tagged: screen readers get its headings and paragraphs in your reading order, the alt text of pictures and shapes, tables with their header rows, and links (decoration is marked to be skipped). If the browser closes before you save, DSKEDTR offers your work back the next time it opens (that copy stays in this browser only).
DSKEDTR is desktop publishing in the browser, for the things people used Microsoft Publisher for. It is being built in steps; the Changelog says what each one added.
Private by design. Your documents and pictures never leave this device. There are no uploads, accounts or analytics, and the page's security policy blocks it from sending data anywhere. The one exception is one you ask for: getting a font from Google Fonts sends that font's name (and nothing else) to jsDelivr, which serves Google Fonts' files. Pictures are redrawn as they come in, which leaves hidden data (like a phone photo's location) behind.
Outside code, each pinned to one version and checked against a fixed fingerprint (the one-file edition has them inside): opentype.js 1.3.4 by Frederik De Bleser (reads the font), Paper.js 0.12.18 by Jürg Lehni and Jonathan Puckey (Merge Shapes), pdf-lib 1.17.1 by Andrew Dillon and @pdf-lib/fontkit 1.1.1, after fontkit by Devon Govett (writing PDFs). All MIT licence. Hyphenation patterns (US English): hyph_en_US from the Hyphen library, by László Németh, after the plain TeX hyphenation table and the TUGboat exceptions (TeX Users Group); BSD-style licence.
Font: Atkinson Hyperlegible, by the Braille Institute (SIL Open Font License), designed to be easy to tell letters apart.
Fonts with Office's letter widths (so Publisher files keep their line breaks): Tinos, Arimo, Cousine, Carlito, Caladea (Huerta Tipográfica) and Gelasio (Sorkin Type), each by its Project Authors; all SIL Open Font License, from Google Fonts. Google Fonts are fetched, when you ask, through the Fontsource project on jsDelivr.
Symbols: Greek letters, arrows and maths signs come from parts of DejaVu Sans and DejaVu Serif (Bitstream Vera licence; DejaVu changes in the public domain), renamed DSKEDTR Symbols as that licence asks. Spelling: the English word list is SCOWL (Kevin Atkinson and others), as the hunspell en_US dictionary (from the dictionary-en package by Titus Wormer); its copyright and permission notices, including Ispell's (Geoff Kuenning) and WordNet's (Princeton University), are kept with it inside this file. Publisher files are read with libmspub (Document Liberation Project) as the map of the format; the code is DSKEDTR's own.