Show HN: Script – A text editor for digitally interconnected documents | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Script – A text editor for digitally interconnected documents

use-script.com

98 pointskevintouati70 comments

script is a text editor powering truly digital documents recently launched. Feel free to play with and share your feedback.

Open articleView on HN

Your positioning could be tightened. Revise your tagline to state your product differentiation. Why shouldn't I use an established product like Notion, Coda, or Obsidian? Don't make users think. If they have to, they'll go with the status quo, not you. I also picked up the lawyer vibe and I think you should lean right into it. You could say Script: the text editor for lawyers, then explain how your UX support lawyers. Don't worry that the market is smaller. It is plenty big, you can expand it, and you can't beat the incumbents at the beginning anyway. Pick a battle you can win.

Finally, I think you need to better explain how your product supports DEI, which is mentioned in the second half of the page. You should probably just remove that section; it muddies the message.

Exactly. I saw this and my only reaction was “eh, I’d just use Notion”.

The first thing I thought too, second thing was "wow, people love notes"

We very much look up to Notion for what they build, our angle is more towards the world of formal business and industrial processes (ie. legal contracts, technical specifications, operation manuals, etc.).

We also came up with a way to embed dynamic values seamlessly into text through simple in-line annotation and linked databases, which I don't believe is offered elsewhere.

I learned pretty quickly when I struck out as an entrepreneur that a narrow audience is exponentially easier to succeed with than trying to generalize. It does seem this is rather tailor made for lawyerly document writing, and that is a perfectly suitable niche to target with particular circumstances that could be quite favorable for developing a sales pitch—their time is worth quite a lot of money, and their need to ensure that they have done everything exactly right is mission critical. I wholeheartedly agree with the above comment that positioning this as something like “document authoring for lawyers” would be a smart way to get established in a potentially lucrative market.

Agreed! Whilst we aim to be a generalist business tool for formal business language, the main focus initially is legal & transactional documents for now.

We will work on making the message clearer. Thank you!

There’s also so much more value to add if you have fewer user personas to worry about.

I’m not a lawyer, but while making some assumptions I bet they would love some auto-formatted references. Maybe as part of some LexisNexis integration? Just log in with oauth and work like you normally do, the bibliography will stay up to date depending on what’s added and removed. Could even highlight content that appears to be unreferenced.

I’m sure some sort of review+approval process is pretty common in law offices, build it in! Pitch it as a way to cut out confusing email threads, but still keep a traceable record of reviews and decisions.

Someone already mentioned it in this thread, but “script” is a pretty unsearchably generic name. If you go for lawyers, now you can go hard on a Latin name. Nothing really stopping you from doing that with any other kind of user, but lawyers seem to love their Latin.

Kevin, here is great marketer, covering this subject:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/heyrobk_positioning-product-m...

Thank you! Very interesting, indeed.

It seems pretty crazy to handicap yourself with an unsearchable name like "Script", especially when it's not an editor for scripts (drama or programming).

The site has no scrollbar for some reason, so it's hard to navigate.

The HN title talks about interconnected documents, as if it's a wiki or something, but the site doesn't seem to mention that.

We've been working with truly digital documents for decades now, and it's not clear that this adds anything important. It also seems focused on proprietary lock-in, and doesn't have pricing available.

Thanks for this! We'll add the scroll bar shortly. Hopefully this will help navigation.

What do you mean by proprietary lock-in? We've put in a lot of effort into making sure the system isn't opinionated and remain fully compatible with the incumbents office suite (ie. .docx, pdf, etc.)

We are still trying to figure out pricing, which we expect to be in line with with other b2b tools of like nature and value.

Maybe I'm wrong about the lock-in. Its features don't seem very compatible with anything else. Do you export the highlighting as Word styles or something? I think you would get more interest if you explained your compatibility features more. No one wants to invest time an effort in a new system they're unsure of unless they have a clear path out of it. That's why note taking systems based on Markdown are popular.

Absolutely - you can export any selected file, folder or the entire project to .docx or .pdf (or both) effortlessly with only simple clicks and split seconds.

It's already available for you to use in the current version.

I love a text editor app and I’m always happy to try out new ones, especially one that looks like it might be useful in extracting meaning from text or linking ideas and relationships between documents.

I also like the cleanness of the design and the illustrations are fun - definitely a cut above the usual Corporate Memphis.

However, and this was the deal-breaker for me, there was no mention of the cost or licensing model.

A one point a subscription was mentioned, but there was no link to find out more. I’m not going to download or try an app without knowing the pricing up-front.

Also missing: an "about us" page. You'd think that this is irrelevant but before I commit myself to changing my company's workflow over to a new piece of software, I want to know about the people behind it.

I want to know:

- Where they're based

  - are they in the EU?  

  - are they from a stable country?  

  - what's the time zone difference?

- How many people they employ

- Whether they're owned by a larger, more established company

- What their other/past products are

- How long they've been in business

- etc...

Agreed! Will get to that soon. The project is UK-based and government backed (through R&D grants) and founders are EU, US & Israel nationals. I'll leave it to you to make a determination as to the stability of the region(s).. :)

Some (hopefully) constructive feedback. UI looks great. FWIW I don't dislike the "cartoon people" as per the other comment - much more original than the usual stock illustrations you see.

But... I wouldn't get as far as downloading this without having a much clearer idea of whether this is a standalone app - fully offline - or some sort of cloud/SaaS service ala Notion, with a desktop client.

The integrations and the "dedicated project workspace" terminology makes me think it might be the latter?

Either way, this should be made clearer I think.

But the concept looks very nice!

Thanks for this! Yes - I agree that this could be made clearer. Whilst the app is currently available on Desktop with a fully offline mode, it will soon be available in-browser, much like the way Notion does it.

"Proprietary syntax highlighting system" is absolutely a deal-killer here. That would be the thing that would make me stand up and say "avoid this like the plague."

Figure out how to do this without doing that. Obsidian did.

Thanks for this. Not sure I understand what the concern is. It's proprietary in the sense that it is unlike what you would have seen elsewhere. But it uses plain natural language (ie. no particular syntax or markdown - unlike Obsidian). It is also not opinionated and fully exportable to other tools.

That's not what "proprietary" actually means? It means the opposite of "free/open" in the sense of software. The implication (true or not) is that however you're doing the behind the scenes magic, you intend to keep that part a secret and/or behind intellectual property rights, such that I am not allowed to hack at it if I wish.

It is a possible way to "value-add" -- aka be the thing that people can't have unless they pay for it, that strategy is your choice and it's not a crazy or awful one per se. But I will not only always stay away from it, I'll always tell other people to as well.

So far as I have seen, it ALWAYS ends one of two ways: It ends up being open anyway or the company screws people over, eventually. I'm fine waiting for the former and not risking the latter.

Thanks for the lecture on semantics.

If you chose to stay away from value-adding tools solely because services are charged, you are free to do just that.

Boy oh boy, HN loves their note-taking apps. I guarantee I'd hit the front page by just using the title "Show HN: Markdown note-taking app written in Rust."

More to the point, is there any reason you're hijacking the browser scrollbar (Windows 11, Brave) or is that a bug on my end? And to be completely honest here, the app looks completely uninspiring. It looks clinical (in a bad way) and lacks any sort of identity or playfulness. Also, word salad like "powering truly digital documents in a dedicated project workspace" gives me a ChatGPT vibe. "Truly digital" as opposed to.. "falsely digital?" Come on.

I’m gonna have to ask you not to use the phrase ‘markdown note-taking app written in Rust’ lightly. All my notification systems lit up and I had already pulled out my credit card.

Truly digital.. As opposed to static, standalone files designed to be printed on paper (ie. MS Word, Google Docs, PDF, etc.), which still remains the norm in the industry.

Happy to hear your thoughts on what would make a business tool built for formal industrial processes more 'inspiring' or 'playful'.

No ChatGPT was used in our choice of words. Feel free to suggest any alternative wording would be happier with.

Truly digital? I don’t know what that means

Typewriter? What do you mean by that?

Proprietary syntax highlighting? Why would I want that?

Integrates with… file types?

Why the cartoon people?

Truly digital? I don’t know what that means

Well, they're "powered" so they must be truly digital. Or something like that.

Typewriter? What do you mean by that?

Seems pretty clear. Even if you're not 50 years old, you've seen a typewriter and know what one is. It's not 2123 yet.

Proprietary syntax highlighting? Why would I want that?

It looks like this is syntax highlighting for non-programmers. People in certain types of businesses might like syntax highlighting customized to their needs, rather than repurposing the syntax highlighting used by programmers.

Integrates with… file types?

Worse, only five file types from three companies.

Why the cartoon people?

Maybe to seem friendly? Looks like Schoolhouse Rock to me. Since it's collaborative, I guess he's trying to show people together. Better than rando Adobe Stock of generic people super excited about doing mundane things.

That said…

When I click "Expore," some kind of menu pops up, but it's mostly off the side of my very wide computer screen, so I have no idea what that's supposed to do.

The contrast ratio of the entire page is awful. It's like looking at a web site through a light drizzle.

For what's supposed to be a basic, informative landing page, there's an awful lot of outbound connections that my computer is happy to block.

Ah, later on when I click on "Explore" the pop-up wants to know what kind of computer I have. How about I have a "None of Your Business Yet." Do you support that?

...and it stopped scrolling and responding to anything.

This page should have been just bare HTML/images/CSS.

Truly digital.. As opposed to static, standalone files designed to be printed on paper (ie. MS Word, Google Docs, PDF, etc.), which still remains the norm in the industry.

Syntax highlighted has proven to make complex syntax more readable in other industries, like programming.

We use it to make complex business language more understandable and accessible to those with reading & writing disabilities.

I like the direction you are thinking Kevin, clearly you have a background in law and it's noticeable in what you're launching with script.

I agree the drafting process for legal documents has fundamentally not improved while IDEs for software code supportive tooling has gotten much better.

I've kicked the tires on the editor and like some of your ideas a whole lot, it would be wonderful though if there was some sort of programmatic interaction or some sort of interface for electronic composition and export of documents.

Thanks for the helpful feedback! We're definitely thinking about ways to introduce logic and conditional statements so you could for example manage payroll with single clicks across your entire workforce, only from the content of interconnected employment contracts.

It seems like something I'd want, but the site doesn't give enough information about what the product is. It states a few high-level goals, like Office integration, but it doesn't say _how_.

Who is the target customer? Some of the features seem interesting and useful, like domain-specific syntax highlighting, Definition tooltips.

The site talks about accessibiltity and inclusion, but doesn't expand on what that actually entails.

All of the "Explore" links just download the app instead of expanding on the feature.

I mean, this looks like it could be a nifty product, but as others have said, you must be clear about wetting your target audience in the first screen of the page, and then provide details about what are each of the features.

You can't rely on people installing it to understand if it's for them. You got to make them _think_ it's for them first, then they'll download it and take the time to try it.

There are lots of small psychological hurdles to overcome before someone decides to install a piece of software and commit time to trying it. Downloading it going to require me to clean-up the setup file at some point, maybe it's a messy install, and it's going to be a pain to uninstall, maybe it's not really safe or could be a security hazard or mess up with other parts of my system, or it will just crash, maybe it requires libraries or runtimes that I don't have on my machine (jre?), maybe it will require an account, and I'm not ready to create one, maybe it's complex to use and I'm just going to waste time, maybe it's really targetted at lawyers and won't fit my industry, maybe...

[edit]: so I downloaded and ran the setup and Windows Smartscreen barked at me, and now I have to bypass that safety net. I hate Windows Smartscreen and will force through for software I know to be safe (like grafana), but I know nothing of this software, and I'm not sure I should force its installation. A major hurdle. Maybe having a separate page show up when downloading for Windows, explaining Smartcreen could popup and how to bypass it would help non-techie users?

The site really needs some videos showing it in action, and how it differs from a regular editor or word processor. The screenshots give a tantalizing clue, but I'm left wondering how it actually works from a practical perspective.

Also, I use Word 2010. Will it really integrate with that?

This

I want to be able to try something without signing up. I'll sign up if it's good.

Gating is part of the growth playbook from ten years ago. It is considered outdated now, where the idea is to demonstrate value first, as you said.

Gating makes your conversion rates look good, as it filters out prospects unlikely to convert, but it also reduces the volume of users who might convert.

Maybe gating makes sense for slow growth and so might be appropriate here?

It makes sense when non-conversion is expensive; e.g., in customer support, or resource usage.

Noted! Thank you.

We are working on an in-browser version, at which point, we will offer a playground for everyone to experiment with pre-login. reply

Maybe it's my ignorant paranoia - but entering my google password into a login box produced by an app i just downloaded makes me nervous.

I am (mostly) sure it was doing a legitimate OAuth - but how can I tell?

I noticed the exact same thing and the fact it didn't pick up my login session in safari... which for me raised some alarm bells that this "could" be a nice ploy to grab my google credentials.

For this reason it was a hard no, I proceeded no further and deleted the app.

No problem, thanks for giving it a try. You're welcome to use the Google SSO, provided this gives you more assurance.

Happy to discuss any specific concerns or issues you had during your log in session.

You're welcome to use the Google SSO, handled by.. Google. Hopefully this gives you a bit more assurance.

What does "digitally interconnected" mean?

Also, out of curiosity, does the legal world still hang on to some obscure version of WordPerfect, or have they made the switch to Word?

As of 2006 (when I left the legal tech world), the transition to Word was already well underway. Law firms hated it, but like everywhere else it was becoming The Way. And before Word, there were no "obscure" versions of WordPerfect; it was very widely used, in and out of the legal industry.

Everyone loved WordPerfect because of its ability to tune the final output. Formatting requirements for some court filings are very specific. Back in the day, it was like "12 point Courier, double spaced, no more than 50 pages in length" for appellate briefs (that's from memory, may not match the actual situation at the time) and it was important that an electronically transmitted document look alike on every machine, something that's virtually impossible to guarantee with Word.

This was in the day before print-to-PDF drivers were available, and no one was going to buy Adobe Acrobat licenses for every attorney, paralegal, secretary and word processor in the firm. Wordperfect was well-loved for a reason.

Oh yes, I used WordPerfect 5.1 myself. I even had a function key template for my keyboard. By "obscure" version, I meant some version still in use, like WordPerfect Office Professional 2021.

Thanks! Would you consider a new job? ;)

Haha, no. My law firm IT days are long over. Thinking back on it, though, with the strong antipathy many middle-aged and older attorneys had against typing, though, how they got papers written in college and law school. All those guys (and they were mostly guys) knew how to do was talk into a dictation machine; the word processing work was mostly for the womenfolk.

Sadly, true. Although things work differently these days I'd hope.

Oh, certainly. When I left the industry in 2006, attorneys younger than 40 or so were all competent computer users, though for many of them dictation was still a faster way to draft documents. They were good at email and at editing the documents coming out of the Word Processing department in realtime on the screen.

Digitally interconnected .. means a way to connect multiple sections and documents across an entire project environment. Currently with MS Word, the idea is to produce static files siloed in the 4 corners of the page. With script, you no longer write on 'paper' but in a dedicated workspace which opens doors to a wide array of 'context-aware' possibilities.

Oh, like a wiki, or Scrivener, or some other tools, but specialized for legal writing?

Yes, exactly.

There is no information about the pricing after trying it for free. I never, ever invest time if I don't know what it costs. Maybe others feel that way, too.

We are still trying to work out pricing which we intend to be fair and inline with other tools in the industry. We'll be on the website soon.

I love to try every authoring platform out there however this one seems to require login even before I can type first word. Would be great to drop that requirement so that one can try the editing experience without a login wall

We are working on an in-browser version, at which point, we will offer a playground for everyone to experiment with pre-login.

The product looks OK. The art is terrible, it looks like it's meant to sell novelty items like itching powder or fart bombs.

I like the cartoon style of the logos, did you hired a designer for it or did you used a generative tool like Midjourney ?

Thank you! No we didn't use Midjourney for that.

Please accept my sincere thanks for moving on from corporate memphis. And I think this is an interesting project!

Thank you!

When I click on the blog link I can see only the first paragraph. How do I get to the rest of it?

The screenshots are impossible to view because they go off the page on Android Chrome

Only basic Office file types supported? No thanks.

Not even markdown is on the list.

This was not built as a traditional markdown editor, however, we are working on an integration.

Read the site, no idea what this is

Explore downloads an EXE. No. Thanks.

I didn't see any mention of AI tech -- using embeddings to automatically surface relevant documents, a chat mode to answer questions about them, etc.

It seems like the legal industry always has a great deal of inertia around tools, such that it will be a huge effort to change software, but if something does overcome that inertia I think it's likely to be because of AI features.

Thanks! We are certainly looking into AI capabilities but are now handful with building the right foundations that will sustain all forms of industry specific LLMs in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com