Blooksy • Flexum

Overview

Blooksy helps authors and academics turn ideas into finished manuscripts. To serve both novelists and researchers, they needed an editor that felt like Google Docs for long-form writing — real-time collaboration with roles, templates for books and papers, and bulletproof exports that honor strict formatting rules.

Flexum partnered with Blooksy to build the editor from scratch on CKEditor 5 with CKEditor Cloud Services for collaboration—then layered in structured authoring, an AI “blank-page breaker,” and custom exports for Word and PDF (with automatic TOC and publisher-friendly formatting). As CKEditor partners, we were able to go deep on configuration and performance while keeping the experience familiar and fast.

The challenge

Blooksy’s editor had to satisfy two demanding worlds:

Creative writing: front-matter, chapters, back-matter; drafts that evolve with editors and beta readers.
Academic writing: predefined section structures, citations/notes, and exports that pass formal submission checks.

On top of that, the product needed Google-Docs-style sharing (read/comment/edit), low-latency multiplayer, and one-click DOCX/PDF that remained faithful to the source—including a generated TOC and section numbering—without dragging the roadmap.

The Flexum solution

Editor foundation on CKEditor 5

We implemented a schema-driven CKEditor 5 setup tailored for long-form documents: headings/sections, notes, images, and page-aware controls that keep manuscripts clean and navigable.

Real-time collaboration & roles

Using CKEditor Cloud Services, Blooksy supports live presence, comments, track changes, revision history, and a read/comment/edit permission model—so authors, editors, and reviewers can work together safely.

Structured authoring for books & papers

We modeled front-matter → chapters → back-matter for books and predefined sections for academic papers, giving Blooksy guardrails that keep documents consistent while staying flexible for each author’s process.

AI draft assistant to beat the blank page

Inside the editor, an AI tool helps generate first passes (outlines, opening paragraphs, section scaffolds), so writers can start editing instead of staring at an empty page.

Reliable Word & PDF export

For PDF, we integrated a third-party rendering flow tuned for pagination and typographic control.

For Word, we built a custom DOCX pipeline—later open-sourced in Flexum Labs—to guarantee structure-aware output and an automatic multi-level TOC that meets publisher and submission requirements.

Results

From idea to draft, faster

Templates plus an AI kick-start shorten the “blank-page” phase and get writers into flow sooner

Trustworthy collaboration

Authors, editors, and reviewers work together with comments, suggestions, and roles—without risking document integrity

Submission-ready exports

DOCX and PDF deliver predictable formatting and a generated TOC, cutting time lost to manual fix-ups

A scalable foundation

With CKEditor 5 and a custom export stack, Blooksy can evolve features without re-platforming

“They're awesome and will take your project wherever you need it to go. Flexum has been doing awesome with the development.”

Anthony Joiner

CEO, Blooksy

Conclusion

Blooksy shows how an editor-first build can serve two demanding worlds—creative writing and academic publishing—without compromise. By starting from zero on CKEditor 5 with CKEditor Cloud Services, layering structured authoring for books and papers, adding an AI draft assistant to beat the blank page, and delivering submission-ready Word/PDF exports (powered by our open-sourced DOCX pipeline), we turned complex requirements into a dependable authoring experience the team can maintain and extend. This mirrors our approach on other engagements: precise engineering, careful UX, and a foundation that lasts.

How Blooksy built a book- and paper-ready collaborative editor with Flexum