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Last updated January 18, 2024

Style Sanity Portable Text blocks with the Tailwind .prose class

A Blocks component that will allow you to split rendering of normal text blocks (`_type==='block'`) like `h1`, `h2`, `p`, etc, and modules.

This was inspired by the ProseableText guide, which I found while looking for a good solution.

Tailwind's typography plugin is a great way of quickly getting a base level of styling applied to a piece of text, with easy ways to customize individual elements as well. Naively, you could use it by wrapping your <PortableText> component in a <div className="prose">.

However, there are several issues with that:

  1. It will apply styling to everything, e.g. also paragraphs, headings etc that are inside custom modules
  2. The first-child styles that remove top margin don't work on blocks of text after a custom module

The aforementioned guide states that the first issue now could be solved by slapping not-prose on your custom modules. However, that will disable you from using it again in that module if you wanted. For example, I have a custom module called "image with text", where I want the text to be formatted with .prose again β€” but this is impossible once there is a not-prose somewhere above in the DOM tree.

The solution I have built is based on the approach from <ProseableText>, but I simplified it a bit and made it recursive. That way blocks of text inside modules are automatically wrapped in a <div className="prose"> container again, giving both styling and working first-child styles.

Here you go, this is blocks/index.tsx:

import { PortableText } from '@portabletext/react'
import { PortableTextBlock } from '@portabletext/types'
import { EncodeDataAttributeCallback } from '@sanity/react-loader'

import SectionImage from './section-image'

type Props = {
  value: PortableTextBlock[]
  sanity?: EncodeDataAttributeCallback
}

export default function Blocks({ value, sanity }: Props) {
  let div: PortableTextBlock[] = []
  return value.map((block, i, blocks) => {
    // Normal text blocks (p, h1, h2, etc.) β€” these are grouped so we can wrap them in a prose div
    if (block._type === 'block') {
      div.push(block)

      // If the next block is also text, group it with this one
      if (blocks[i + 1]?._type === 'block') return null

      // Otherwise, render the group of text blocks we have
      const value = div
      div = []

      return (
        <div key={block._key} className="prose-lg prose-h2:max-w-[32ch] prose-h2:text-5xl">
          <PortableText
            value={value}
            components={{
              marks: {
                // ...
              },
            }}
          />
        </div>
      )
    } else {
      // Non-text blocks (modules, sections, etc.) β€” note that these can recursively render text
      // blocks again
      return (
        <PortableText
          key={block._key}
          value={block}
          components={{
            types: {
              'section.image': ({ value }) => <SectionImage {...value} sanity={sanity} />,
              // ...
            },
          }}
        />
      )
    }
  })
}

and as an example, here is the section module (blocks/section-image.tsx) β€” simplified a bit but to demonstrate the recursiveness:

import { PortableTextBlock } from '@portabletext/types'
import { SanityImageObject } from '@sanity/image-url/lib/types/types'
import { EncodeDataAttributeCallback } from '@sanity/react-loader'
import { image } from 'lib/sanity/client'

import Blocks from '.'

type Props = {
  image: {
    image: SanityImageObject
  }
  richtext: PortableTextBlock[]
  _key: string
  sanity?: EncodeDataAttributeCallback
}

export default function SectionImage({ image: source, richtext, _key, sanity }: Props) {
  const hotspot = source.image.hotspot
    ? { objectPosition: `${source.image.hotspot.x * 100}% ${source.image.hotspot.y * 100}%` }
    : undefined

  return (
    <section className="...">
      <div className="..." data-sanity={sanity?.([`body:${_key}`, 'image', 'image'])}>
        <img
          src={image(source.image)}
          width={400}
          height={1000}
          className="absolute h-full w-full object-cover"
          style={hotspot}
        />
      </div>
      <div className="...">
        <Blocks value={richtext} />
      </div>
    </section>
  )
}

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