Free & Open · Release No. 1

Scriptorium

A word processor that only speaks Markdown. One file. No install, no account, no cloud. It stays yours.

Opens the real editor in your browser — nothing installs, nothing is sent anywhere. To use the AI, run a local model (LM Studio / Ollama) and point it at http://localhost:1234; for the assistant to reach a local model reliably, download the file and open it directly.

MIT · Free · No telemetry
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Why it Exists

I write a lot in Markdown — it is how the work gets handed back and forth all day. And every time I needed it to actually look like a document — something to print, something to hand to another human — I was stuck. Copy it somewhere, wrestle the formatting, export a PDF, do it again tomorrow. So one night I got tired of not having the tool, and I built the tool. On a whim. Because it was fun. It came out further along than I had any right to expect, so here it is — free, for anyone who has the same itch.

That is the honest origin. Not a product plan — a Saturday-night fix for a problem I had, cleaned up enough to give away.

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What it Is

A single, self-contained HTML file. Download it, double-click it, write. What you are editing is a real .md file the whole time — round-tripped losslessly by a genuine document engine, not faked. When you are done, it prints to clean, paginated PDF pages fit for a desk or a boss.

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Who it's For

If you write in Markdown

and need it to look real

Notes, reports, specs, handouts — anything that lives as .md but has to be read by someone who expects a document. Write it plain, print it polished.

If your machine is locked down

you can't install, but you can open a file

No admin rights? No software approvals? A single HTML file you just open sidesteps all of it. For a lot of people that is the whole unlock.

If you run local models

an AI writer that never leaves the box

Point the assistant at your own LM Studio or Ollama. The document and the model both stay on your hardware. No cloud, no leak, no bill.

If you just want a clean tool

that respects you

No accounts to make, no data to hand over, no upsell. It does one thing and gets out of the way.

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How to Run It

  1. Download scriptorium.html from the GitHub repository.
  2. Double-click it. It opens in your browser like any page — but it is a full editor.
  3. Write. Your drafts and settings are remembered on your own machine.
  4. Print or export to PDF when it needs to leave as a document. (Optional: point it at a local AI in the settings.)
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Built for Agents

The assistant isn't a chat box bolted on the side — it has full hands in the tool. It reads and edits the live document with real tools, reworks exactly the passage you highlight, searches the web when you give it a search helper, and renders and prints for you. Any function-calling model can use the whole tool set — point it at whatever you run.

It's free and it's MIT. Fork it, gut it, rename it, wire it into something else, sell what you build around it — do whatever you want with it. That's the whole idea.

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The Give-Back

This is the first thing Shoggoth Analytics is releasing free — MIT-licensed, no strings, no telemetry, no signup. A small, useful tool, given back to the people building in the open.

The local-AI and open-source communities gave us most of what runs in the lab. This is a little of it, returned. It is new, and it does its one job well; if it is useful to you, that is the entire point. Take it, use it, hand it to someone else.

Get Scriptorium · GitHub More from the Lab