EMStudio

What it is

EMStudio is the standalone editor for the Extended Matrix and, from EM 1.6, the successor to yEd for authoring the graph. It reads and writes em.json natively, so the record is never round-tripped through a foreign format: the graph you edit is the graph on disk. Existing GraphML files remain first-class — EMStudio opens them directly and translates the palette-based semantics into native em.json entities, so nothing that was authored in yEd is left behind.

Where EM Tools lives inside Blender and drives a 3D scene, EMStudio is the sovereign editor: it owns the graph, the documentation corpus and the narrative, and it talks to everything else — Blender, a Heriverse viewer, a Tropy library — through a single connector contract.

The six workspaces

EMStudio is organised as six tab arrangements, each a task rather than a panel:

• Documentation — bring material in: drop files, browse storage, read what a study is built from.
• Graph — interpret stratigraphy: the graph with the table below and the inspector, outliner and log to the side.
• DTC — declare provenance: the documentation corpus as a directed graph (acquisition, derivation, attribution), where the attributor is recorded as distinct from the author.
• Comparisons — hold your study next to what is not yours, on a curated shelf fenced by whose each resource is (own study · own HDT · other HDT).
• Narrative — read the graph as prose: chapters that anchor to epochs and activities, with live embeds (matrix, map, timeline) that stay in sync with the record.
• Annotator — trace regions on a photograph or drawing and tie them back to the graph.

Why it matters

EMStudio makes the two-tier model first-class — the interpretive record (stratigraphic units, epochs, activities) and the documentation/provenance corpus (the DTC) live side by side, and rights declared in the DTC bite: an asset under embargo is refused, its licence travels with it. The narrative is not a separate document but the same graph read differently, and its exports (HTML, Word, LaTeX, Jupyter) carry the live figures with them.

Manual

The full user manual — tutorial, how-to recipes, interface reference and the rationale behind the design — is on Read the Docs: EMStudio documentation.

Status & versions

EMStudio is developed within the StratiGraph project. It is in active development (1.6-dev), paired with EM 1.6 and built on s3Dgraphy 1.6. English is the default interface language. Cross-platform binaries (macOS, Windows, Linux) are planned for autumn 2026. Because it is pre-release, expect the interface and the feature set to keep moving — the manual tracks the current state, and news of what is landing appears on the News page.

Editor transition. From EM 1.6, EMStudio is the recommended editor for authoring the Extended Matrix. yEd remains fully supported for the entire EM 1.5 LTS line — it is not deprecated on 1.5, and the palette convention that formalised EM lives on there. The GraphML import path exists precisely to make the switch to 1.6 painless: open your .graphml, save as .em.json, keep going.