A library to add buttons to quotes and text selection that make it quick and easy for your readers to share quotes from your website.

Quotable is a TypeScript library (distributed as a browser bundle and an ES6 module) that allows you to easily add a contextual popup to your web page for sharing selected text and quotes on Twitter (and soon, other networks).

Quotable is also available as a WordPress plugin.

yarn add quotable-toolbar

Assuming an html page with a structure similar to this;

<div id="blog-container">
  <p>...</p>
  <blockquote>...</blockquote>
  <blockquote class="is-quotable">...</blockquote>
  <blockquote class="not-quotable">...</blockquote>
  <p>...</p>
  <blockquote>
    <p>...</p>
    <p>...</p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>...</p>
</div>

You can activate Quotable like this;

import Quotable from 'quotable-toolbar';

window.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', () => {
  const quotableToolbar = new Quotable({
    selector: `#blog-container`, // Wrapping element to activate Quotable on
    isActive: {
      blockquotes: true, // Whether to add Quotable links to blockquotes
      textSelection: true, // Whether to activate text selection popup
      include: ['.is-quotable'], // Blockquotes to always add links to
      exclude: ['.not-quotable'], // Blockquotes to never add links to
    },
    url: window.location.href, // URL to share, should be cannonical
    twitter: {
      via: 'JoFromAkron', // Twitter account to @
      related: 'JoFromAkron', // Twitter account to suggest after sharing
      hashtags: ['quotable', 'typescript'], // Hashtags to add to tweet
    },
  });
  quotableToolbar.activate();
});

Quotable has two separate features you can activate, 1) add sharing links to blockquotes and 2) add a sharing link popup on text selection.

Quotable will search for every blockquote in the container you select, and append a sharing link. If the blockquote contains paragraphs, the sharing link will be appended to each paragraph. Quotable also wraps the text content of the paragraph or blockquote with a span, used to highlight the text when the sharing link is hovered. You can also selectively add the sharing link to blockquotes by setting isActive.blockquotes: false and passing an array to include of selectors for elements you want to add sharing link to. Alternatively, you can selectively deactivate the sharing link when isActive.blockquotes: true by passing an array to exclude of selectors for the elements you don't want to add a sharing link to.

Quotable adds a popup for every text selection within the container you select. You can disable this with isActive.textSelection: false

The url option determines which url will be shared, when the user clicks a sharing link. You can use window.location.href, but if that's not necessarily the canonical url you want people to share, you should set this manually with that value.

Right now, Quotable has support for a link to share content on Twitter. You can configure Twitter sharing options with the twitter options object. In the future, support will be added for other networks (Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, etc), and each option will have it's own settings key in the options object.