What it is
DocForge is a structured document editor built for organisations that produce high-stakes documents under strict consistency and traceability requirements — regulatory agencies, legal departments, interinstitutional bodies.
Authors write content within assigned clauses. Reviewers validate clause by clause, independently of the rest. Legal teams manage master templates; when a template changes, every document derived from it receives the update for review. All data is stored on the institution's own servers.
Key properties
- Template propagation. A correction at the template level reaches all live drafts within minutes, without manual comparison.
- Clause-level review. Reviewers are assigned to specific clauses. Parallel review across a long document is the default, not an exception.
- Content-enforced formatting. Authors declare content type, not visual style. Formatting is applied at export from the institution's Word template. Direct formatting controls are not accessible.
- Per-clause version history. Each clause maintains its own snapshot history, independent of other clauses. A clause can be restored without affecting the rest of the document.
- Immutable audit trail. Every manual snapshot is committed to a git repository as plain text. The history is readable with standard tools and independent of DocForge.
- Format-agnostic export. The same document produces a
.docxusing institutional Word styles, or LaTeX, or HTML — without re-editing. - Self-hosted. No external dependencies. All data remains on the institution's infrastructure.
Technical foundations
- TipTap — structured collaborative editor with custom node types.
- Yjs — CRDT real-time synchronisation, stateless between sessions.
- Node.js + PostgreSQL — API, WebSocket server, relational storage.
- YunoHost — current packaged deployment. Docker and Helm chart planned.