Open-source self-publishing toolkit for authors. Books, articles, picture books, comics, and multi-platform content workflows. Write with a built-in Story Bible to keep your characters, places and plot points consistent, then export to EPUB / PDF / audiobook. Plugin-based and local-first — runs fully offline in the browser (GitHub-Pages PWA) or self-hosted via Docker.

Built on PluginForge, a reusable plugin framework based on pluggy.

Web app | Documentation | Issues | Current version: v0.51.0

Bibliogon's standout feature: a per-book database of your fiction's recurring elements — characters, settings, plot points, items and lore — that lives right beside your manuscript so you never lose track of who's who or what happened where. Provided by the plugin-story-bible plugin.

• Five entity types, each with its own icon, accent color and per-type metadata: Characters (aliases, role, traits, arc notes, relationships), Settings (type, geography, significance), Plot Points (timeline position, story beat, involved characters), Items (significance, current holder), and Lore (magic / technology / culture / history / religion / language). The type registry is the single source of truth in backend/config/story-bible-entities.yaml.
• Rich-text descriptions per entity (TipTap) plus an inline create / edit / delete sidebar that slides in next to the chapter list.
• Relationships — connect any two entities as ally, rival, family, mentor, romantic or neutral, with an optional note. Edited in a dedicated "Relationships" section of the entity detail view; each type is color-coded.
• @-mentions — type @ in the chapter editor or a picture-book page to autocomplete the book's entities (grouped by type, name-search as you type). Inserts a color-coded inline mention badge; clicking it opens that entity in the sidebar.
• Auto-detect — scan your chapter / page text for entity names (exact, case-insensitive, word-boundary; short names skipped, already-linked entities excluded) and one-click "Link automatically" to create the appearance links.
• Appearance tracker — link an entity to a page or chapter (drag it onto a Storyboard card, or auto-detect), each link carrying an optional role + notes. The entity detail view lists every place it appears.
• Arc View — an SVG swim-lane timeline: each entity gets a lane, every appearance a mood-colored, role-sized dot, connected by continuity polylines; click a dot to jump to that page. A toggle draws color-coded bezier lines between two entities' lanes wherever they share a page.
• Continuity Checker — advisory warnings when an entity disappears, has a long absence gap, or a page has no entities at all.
• Markdown export — export the whole Story Bible (grouped by type, with appearances) as a Markdown document.

• WYSIWYG and Markdown editor (TipTap v3) with node-based math formulas (KaTeX, inline $...$ + block $$...$$) and built-in editor search (prosemirror-search)
• Story Bible — per-book character / setting / plot / item / lore database with relationships, @-mentions, auto-detect, Arc View timeline and continuity checking (see above)
• Full-book structure with chapter types for every section (Preface, Foreword, Prologue, Dedication, Part, Epilogue, Afterword, Index, Also by the Author, Excerpt, Call to Action, ...)
• Genre catalog for Novel, Non-Fiction, Technical, Biography, Poetry, Children, Fantasy, Thriller, Romance, Cookbook, Travel, and more
• Drag-and-drop chapter ordering with collapsible sections
• Dual export engines: client-side in the browser (Markdown, HTML, Text, PDF, EPUB, DOCX, LaTeX — works offline) and desktop via manuscripta/Pandoc
• Audiobook generation with 5 TTS engines (Edge TTS, Google Cloud TTS, Google Translate, pyttsx3, ElevenLabs)
• Content-hash cache: unchanged chapters are not re-generated (saves money on paid engines)
• Cost estimation and savings tracking for paid TTS engines
• Dry-run mode: listen to a sample before committing to a full export
• Persistent audiobook storage with per-chapter and merged downloads
• Full-data backup and restore (.bgb) with images and optional audiobook files
• Book metadata: ISBN, ASIN, Publisher, Keywords, Cover, Custom CSS, repository URL
• In-app help panel with Markdown rendering, search, and context-sensitive links
• Multi-provider AI assistant (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Mistral, LM Studio) with chapter review, marketing text generation, and context-aware suggestions
• Plugin system with ZIP installation for third-party plugins
• Encrypted credential storage (Fernet) for API keys and service accounts
• 6 color palettes (Warm Literary, Cool Modern, Nord, Classic, Studio, Notebook) x Light/Dark = 12 theme variants
• i18n: German, English, Spanish, French, Greek, Portuguese, Turkish, Japanese
• Responsive layout with hamburger menu on mobile
• Settings sidebar with 5 grouped sections (Darstellung, Inhalt, System, Info, Gefahrenzone) replacing the older horizontal-tabs layout
• Editor display settings popover for per-user width / font / size / line-height customisation
• Dashboard pagination with configurable page size, applied across books, articles, and trash views
• Bulk-restore parity for articles and books from the trash view
• Alt+Z word-wrap toggle in the editor for proofing long lines side-by-side
• Author datalist (Pattern A) across editors with the Authors-Database as the autocomplete source
• Danger Zone full-system reset under Settings for a clean slate
• Accessibility WCAG 2.1 AA audit pass: ARIA labels, focus order, keyboard navigation
• Settings > Backups tab with version-history list, per-entry delete, clear-all action, and a Compare-Backups dialog for diffing two .bgb snapshots
• Per-search clear button (X) on every search/filter input across Articles, Books, Authors-Database, and Help so a single field can be cleared without resetting other filters
• Collapsible-section open-state persistence in the picture-book and comic-book editor sidebar (Tier 1 Visual Style and Tier 2 Typography sections remember their state per surface across navigation and reload)
• White-label feature flag (features.white_label in app.yaml) gates the Settings > Erweitert tab; off by default so power-user surfaces stay accessible via YAML edits without cluttering the sidebar
• In-place title editing on every editor (book, article, picture-book, comic-book) via a shared pencil-toggle component; published or archived works gate the edit behind a warning banner so a title change is consciously carried over to the publishing platform
• Publication-status lifecycle (Draft / Ready / Published / Archived) shared by books and articles, with a status badge on every dashboard card and list row
• Locale-aware date formatting that follows the active UI language across every surface

Bibliogon runs as a fully offline Progressive Web App on GitHub Pages — no backend, no install: astrapi69.github.io/bibliogon. All data lives in your browser (IndexedDB, local-first); the backendless build fires zero /api requests (enforced by a hard E2E gate).

• Full authoring offline: books, chapters, articles, picture books, comics, Story Bible, Storyboard, authors and publications all read/write through the storage seam against a seeded IndexedDB.
• Import wizard offline: Markdown / Text / HTML files become a new book + chapter; JSON full-data backups and .bgb backups restore client-side; Medium ZIP exports import in the browser.
• Client-side export engine: Markdown, HTML, Text, PDF, EPUB, DOCX, and LaTeX — generated in the browser, no Pandoc required.
• AI offline: bring your own provider key; calls go browser-direct to your provider and the key is stored locally, never sent anywhere else.
• Backup & restore: a single JSON bundle exports/imports the entire workspace. The in-app Help and the Getting-Started guide work offline too, and unknown routes get a custom 404 page.
• Three-state feature visibility: every gated surface resolves to active, disabled with an explanation, or hidden via a central feature registry (@astrapi69/feature-strategy). Nothing you own is hidden — the genuinely browser-impossible features (Pandoc-based export, Git sync/backup, audiobook TTS, LAN mode) appear disabled with a "requires the desktop app" hint instead of silently vanishing.

Bibliogon supports a dedicated picture-book authoring flow with per-page image + text layouts, a Storyboard grid view, and a direct WeasyPrint PDF pipeline.

• 13 page layouts in 5 categories (chosen from a categorised LayoutPicker): single-image-with-text (image top / bottom / left / right, full-image overlay, image-border with centered text), image-only, multi-image (two-images-with-centered-text, split-horizontal, split-vertical, and a free-form collage of N drag-positioned image + text regions), text-only, and the speech-bubble special layout. Each layout has its own per-layout layout_config namespace so switching layouts preserves prior settings.
• Collage layout (Phase 3): freely drag-and-resize image and text regions on the page with z-index ordering (useDragPosition hook + CollageCanvas); the WeasyPrint walker mirrors the editor geometry so the PDF matches the canvas.
• Tier 1 + Tier 2 properties per layout (Visual-Style and Typography sections in the editor properties pane): text alignment, vertical centering, padding, font family, font size, line-height, text color, font weight, container width/height. A shared computeTierTextStyles helper (TS + Python mirror) keeps the editor preview and the PDF walker in sync.
• Storyboard View (drag-reorder grid): annotate each page with notes, a story-beat tag (Exposition / Inciting / Rising / Climax / Falling / Resolution), a mood color (10-preset palette), and an act-group label for visual chapter boundaries. Story Bible entities can be dragged onto cards to track appearances, surfaced as color-coded entity badges, and an entity filter narrows the grid to pages where selected entities appear. The Storyboard is now available for every book type — prose books get a chapter-card variant (word count + the same four annotations on each Chapter) via the shared StoryboardAnnotations module.
• PDF export via WeasyPrint with KDP-aligned format dropdown (square 8.5x8.5, landscape 8.5x11) + bleed and crop marks controls.
• Layout-switch hygiene: the per-layout layout_config namespace (Fix B) means switching away from and back to a layout preserves its configuration; active text-conversion between TipTap-based and Tier-Property-based layouts keeps the DB shape matching the active layout.

A dedicated comic-book editor (book_type='comic_book') ships multi-panel page layouts with multi-bubble per-panel speech-bubble support.

• Comic panel grid with 7 grid templates (single-panel splash, 1x2, 2x1, 2x2, 2x3, 3x2, 3x3) selectable per page; Add-Panel disables at the template's cell capacity, and a switch to a smaller template triggers an overflow handler (move excess panels to new pages, delete them, or cancel).
• Panel arranging: drag a panel by its handle to reorder it within the page (dnd-kit), or use the "Move to page" menu to send it to another page — the menu shows each target's capacity (Seite N - count/max) and disables full pages.
• Multi-bubble per panel: position bubbles via anchor presets (top-left through bottom-right, plus center) with opacity and size controls, or drag a bubble (and its tail tip) directly on the canvas.
• 6 bubble types (speech, thought, narration, shout, whisper, sound-effect), each rendered as a single continuous SVG path (outline + tail in one shape, no CSS-shape-plus-polygon-tail seam) with type-specific tail behaviour — thought circle-chain, shout spike-absorption, narration forced no-tail. The same path generator runs in the editor preview and the WeasyPrint PDF walker.
• PDF export via the shared WeasyPrint pipeline; comics dispatch through the export_execute hookspec to keep core decoupled from plugin code.

A 5-step XState-driven wizard for Amazon KDP publishing prep with server-side persistence and conflict detection.

• 5 steps: Metadata → Cover → Pricing → ARC reviewers → Launch checklist.
• Server-side state (BookPublishingState row) auto-saves wizard progress; on reopen the wizard rehydrates pricing + ARC choices.
• Conflict banner when the book has been edited outside the wizard (book.updated_at > state.updated_at) so the user re-validates metadata.
• Cover validation with KDP dimension + DPI + bleed checks, surfaced inline at the Cover step.

Beyond books, Bibliogon supports article authoring with multi-platform publication tracking.

• Dedicated article editor with TipTap (separate from the book editor, single-document, no chapter sidebar)
• 8 content types (Blog post, Tutorial, Review, Essay, Newsletter, Interview, Listicle, Short story) from a content-types.yaml registry, chosen via a split-button on the Article Dashboard (default click creates a Blog post; the chevron exposes the other 7). Each type has its own extra metadata fields (e.g. tutorial difficulty / prerequisites / duration, review work + rating, newsletter issue + send date, interview partner + role) stored in a per-article article_metadata JSON column and edited inline in the metadata sidebar
• Article-level metadata: topic (settings-managed), SEO title / description, tags, excerpt, canonical URL, featured image
• Per-platform publication tracking (Medium, Substack, X, LinkedIn, dev.to, Mastodon, Bluesky, custom)
• Drift detection: the editor flags out-of-sync publications when article content changes after publish; a "Verify live" action re-snapshots the baseline
• Promo posts modeled as publications with the is_promo flag (short companion piece linking back to a main publication)
• Manual publishing workflow - no platform API integration yet (Phase 3 scope)

Books can be synchronized with external git repositories for collaboration, backup, and version control.

• Import: clone a public git repo containing a book in Bibliogon's WBT layout
• Commit + Push: save book changes back to the repo via SSH agent, system credential helper, or per-book PAT
• Smart-Merge: three-way diff with per-chapter conflict resolution UI for chapters edited both locally and remotely
• Multi-Language: repos with main-XX branches (e.g. main-de, main-fr) import as linked translations via Book.translation_group_id
• Core-Git Bridge: unified commit fans out to both core git history and the plugin-git-sync subsystem under a per-book lock

All three credential paths are user-configurable from the Git Backup dialog: SSH agent, system credential helper, and per-book PAT input (encrypted, never returned in clear).

.bgb backup files containing multiple books can be imported with per-book selection (default-all-on) and per-book duplicate detection. The import wizard uses an XState v5 state machine to manage the multi-step flow with single-book and multi-book branches and a shared error boundary that reports details + opens a GitHub Issue on failure.

• Docker (Docker Desktop or Docker Engine with Compose)

Linux / macOS:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/astrapi69/bibliogon/main/install.sh | bash

Windows (PowerShell):

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/astrapi69/bibliogon/main/install.ps1 | iex

Both download Bibliogon to ~/bibliogon (Linux/macOS) / %USERPROFILE%\bibliogon (Windows), build the Docker images, and start the app at http://localhost:7880.

After cloning or downloading the repo, double-click the wrapper for your OS:

git clone https://github.com/astrapi69/bibliogon.git
cd bibliogon
./start.sh

cd ~/bibliogon && ./stop.sh                      # Stop
cd ~/bibliogon && ./start.sh                      # Start again
cd ~/bibliogon && ./stop.sh && cd ~ && rm -rf ~/bibliogon  # Uninstall

make install    # Install all dependencies (Poetry, npm, plugins)
make dev        # Start backend (8000) + frontend (5173) in parallel
make test       # Run all tests (backend + plugins + frontend)

Bibliogon follows gitflow: develop is the active development branch (the GitHub default), main carries releases only. Branch feature/* / fix/* from develop and open pull requests against develop.

Quality gates: backend + plugin pytest and frontend Vitest with coverage tracking (current numbers in docs/audits/current-coverage.md), ruff + mypy, ESLint (flat config) + Prettier, bandit SAST and madge circular-dependency detection in CI, Playwright E2E with visual-regression baselines and axe-core accessibility checks, theme/contrast gates (make verify-theme), and a full backup acceptance gate (export → reset → import → verify).

See CLAUDE.md for full development documentation.

The documentation is available in two forms:

• In-App: Click the help icon in the navigation bar to open the slide-over help panel with search, navigation tree, and Markdown rendering.
• Online: astrapi69.github.io/bibliogondocs - MkDocs Material site with full-text search, light/dark mode, and i18n. (The Bibliogon web app itself is hosted separately at astrapi69.github.io/bibliogon.)

Both read from the same Markdown files in docs/help/. To build the docs locally:

make docs-install   # Install MkDocs dependencies (separate venv)
make docs-serve     # Serve at http://localhost:8000 with hot-reload

Browser --> nginx (static files + /api proxy) --> FastAPI (uvicorn)
                                                    |
                                              PluginForge
                                                    |
                              +----------+----------+----------+
                              |          |          |          |
                           Export     Help    Audiobook      ...

• Frontend: React 18, TypeScript, TipTap, Vite, Radix UI, @dnd-kit, react-markdown
• Backend: FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, SQLite, Pydantic v2
• Plugins: PluginForge (PyPI), pluggy-based, YAML-configured
• Export: manuscripta ^0.9.0 (PyPI), Pandoc, write-book-template
• TTS: manuscripta adapter layer with 5 engines (Edge TTS, Google Cloud, gTTS, pyttsx3, ElevenLabs)

All 13 first-party plugins ship free under MIT. Third-party plugins can be installed as ZIP files via Settings > Plugins.

Three-layer config: project app.yaml (defaults) ← user override file (~/.config/bibliogon/secrets.yaml, gitignored) ← env-vars (CI/Docker). Override-wins, env-vars always highest priority. Detailed guide: docs/configuration.md.

Move secrets like ai.api_key out of project app.yaml into the override file or BIBLIOGON_AI_API_KEY env-var. The Settings UI hides the API-key input automatically when an override is active.

Environment variables (set in .env or shell):

• pluginforge - Plugin framework (PyPI)
• manuscripta - Book export pipeline with TTS adapter layer (PyPI)
• write-book-template - Target directory structure for export

Bibliogon is released under the MIT License. All plugins are free and open source.

See SECURITY.md for the responsible disclosure process.

This project follows the Contributor Covenant 2.1. Reports go to asterios.raptis@web.de.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for setup instructions, workflow, and expectations.

Use the appropriate template when opening a new issue:

• Bug Report
• Feature Request
• Question