EMStudio — the standalone EM editor, in development for EM 1.6

A new tool joins the ecosystem: EMStudio, the standalone editor for the Extended Matrix. Where EM Tools lives inside Blender and drives a 3D scene, EMStudio is the sovereign editor — it reads and writes em.json natively, so the graph you edit is the graph on disk, with no round-trip through a foreign format. Existing GraphML files stay first-class: EMStudio opens them directly, translates the palette-based semantics to native em.json entities, and lets you keep working from where you left off in yEd.

The successor to yEd

EMStudio is the tool that will replace yEd for authoring the Extended Matrix. yEd served the project since the beginning — the palette convention formalised there is what turned EM from a proposal into a working practice — and remains fully supported for the entire 1.5 LTS line. From EM 1.6 onwards, EMStudio becomes the recommended editor and em.json the native file it reads and writes end-to-end. The GraphML import path exists precisely to make the transition painless: open your existing .graphml, save as .em.json, keep going.

Six workspaces, one record

EMStudio is organised as six task-shaped workspaces: Documentation to bring material in, Graph to interpret stratigraphy, DTC to declare provenance (where the attributor is recorded as distinct from the author), Comparisons to hold your study next to what is not yours, Narrative to read the graph as prose with live figures, and Annotator to trace regions on photographs and drawings.

One contract for everything else

EMStudio talks to Blender, a Heriverse viewer, a Tropy library and more through a single connector contract — the same shape whether a tool sits beside it on the desktop or a viewer serves the published graph from the cloud. Every write is attributed; rights declared in the DTC are enforced, not decorative.

The manual is online

The full user manual — tutorial, how-to recipes, interface reference and the rationale behind the design — is available on Read the Docs. See the EMStudio tool page for the links.

EMStudio is developed within the StratiGraph project. It is pre-release (1.6-dev): expect the interface and the feature set to keep moving. Cross-platform binaries for macOS, Windows and Linux are planned for autumn 2026; until then, development is open on the repository. News of what is landing will appear here.