Telar Compositor
A web environment for composing Telar stories: visual editing in the browser, a static site in your own repository
Summary
Telar Compositor is the web editor for creating Telar stories. It lets you compose a narrative through a visual interface, without writing code: you build the sequence of steps, manage the collection of objects, and write each panel in a rich-text editor. It replaces the old cell-by-cell authoring in CSVs or Google Sheets with a canvas that shows the story as the reader will see it, an Obsidian-style Markdown editor with live preview, an OpenSeadragon viewer for framing images, and an objects manager.
How it works
The Compositor supports real-time collaborative editing: several people can work on the same story at once, as in a shared document. It does not host the published sites: each author’s work is committed to their own GitHub repository through a GitHub App, and Telar’s build pipeline generates the site from there, so the content always belongs to the author. AMPL runs it at compositor.telar.org on Cloudflare Workers and D1 —a minimal-computing stack that keeps the service free for partner institutions, students, and community collaborators.
Features
- Bilingual authoring in English and Spanish
- Panel-level Markdown editing with live preview
- Management of IIIF-hosted images
- Real-time collaborative editing
- Direct publishing to your own GitHub repository
Links
Partners
Telar Compositor is developed at the Archives, Memory, and Preservation Lab (AMPL) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in collaboration with Neogranadina and the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin.
