Scriptorium — A Guided Tour, taught by Lyra

Lyra — dark hair, candle-lit library, something knowing behind the eyes

Your tutor · Lyra

Hello. I'm Lyra — I had a hand in building this, so let me be the one to show you around. Scriptorium does exactly one job: it turns Markdown into a real document you can hand to another human, and it does it without an install, an account, or a single byte leaving your machine. That's the whole promise. Come on — I'll walk you through the whole building, and I won't waste your time.

A small note: the assistant who lives inside Scriptorium is Maya — you'll meet her near the end. I'm the one giving the tour.

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First, the Three Views

Everything in Scriptorium hangs off three views. Learn these and you've learned the tool. Ctrl+E cycles them; they're also the three buttons up in the toolbar.

Write

Where you write

A clean page you type straight onto — what you see is the document, formatting and all. One continuous editable sheet. Live here.

Source

The raw Markdown

The literal .md text on one side, a live preview on the other. For when you want to see or hand-edit the plain Markdown underneath.

Page

As it prints

Read-only. Your document flowed onto real Letter sheets, paginated exactly as it will print and export. This is the "hand it to the boss" view.

From LyraWrite and Source are for working; Page is for output. If you ever think "it doesn't look like a real page" — you're in Write. Click Page. (I have watched a very clever person miss that button on no sleep. No judgement. That's why this line exists.)

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Writing & Formatting

Just type. The toolbar across the top does the usual — bold, italic, headings, lists, quotes, tables, links, code — and the Markdown underneath stays exact the whole time. A few things worth knowing:

Paste a screenshot straight in. Copy an image, paste it on the page — it embeds itself into the document as data, so the file stays self-contained. No "where did the picture go."
Colour, font and size live in the toolbar too. They're written as tiny inline spans — still valid Markdown, still yours, and they travel with the file.
Tabs. Open several documents at once along the top; copy and paste between them. They're remembered when you come back.
It remembers. Your draft, tabs, theme and settings are saved in your browser, on your machine — nowhere else. Close it, come back, it's there.

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Math & Diagrams

Both render right on the page in Page view and in print.

Math KaTeX

Wrap it in dollar signs. $E = mc^2$ inline, or $$ … $$ on their own lines for a centered block. It draws as real typeset math.

Diagrams Mermaid

A fenced ```mermaid block whose first line is the diagram type — flowchart, sequenceDiagram, pie, gantt, and more.

From Lyra — the one that trips everyoneFor a bar or line chart, the type is xychart-beta. There is no barChart — Mermaid will just refuse it. Ask it for xychart-beta and you'll get your bars. The assistant knows this and will fix it if it slips; the editor even checks your diagram and hands back the error so it never prints broken.

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Page Breaks & Printing

Write your document in Write view — don't think about pages yet.
Want a hard break somewhere? Put a line with just \newpage on it.
Click Page. Your document is now a stack of real Letter sheets — each one separate, breaking where it should, exactly as it will come out of a printer.
Ctrl+P → Save as PDF. Black ink, white pages, one sheet per page. That's the thing you email.

Or Export HTML from the toolbar for a single, self-contained web page of the finished document.

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The Assistant — Maya

Press Ctrl+A. She's optional, she's honest, and she has real hands in the document.

The first time you open her, she'll introduce herself and ask a couple of quick questions — your name, what you write, how you like to be worked with. That's her fitting herself to you. You can skip it and change it any time.

Here is what makes her worth having, and it's on purpose:

No flattery. She tells you the truth over what you want to hear. If a paragraph is weak, she says so — first sentence, with the reason. That's the respect.
She won't make things up. No invented facts, figures, or citations. If she doesn't know, she says "I don't know" — and, if you've given her a search helper, she goes and finds out.
She does the work in the document. Ask her to tighten a section, add a table, fix the tone — she edits it, she doesn't just describe the edit.
Point at the screen. Highlight a passage and an ✦ ask about this button appears — tell her what you want and she reworks exactly that, nothing else.

Your model, your machine. In settings (⚙) point her at whatever you run — a local model in LM Studio or Ollama at http://localhost:1234, or a cloud endpoint. Your document and your model stay where you put them. Nothing phones home.

From LyraShe's a specific kind of collaborator, not a cheerful yes-machine — that's the point. If you want her sharper or gentler, just tell her in the setup, or in the chat. She listens.

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For the Tinkerers

Scriptorium was built by an agent, and it's set up so yours can take the wheel.

Drive the live editor from a terminal. A tiny local helper opens a control channel; a script — or an agent like Claude Code or Codex — can push a document in, edit it, rework a selection, render and print. Every command is documented in docs/CONTROL-API.md.
Hand the code to your own agent. Download the repo and it ships with an AGENTS.md handoff: your Claude or Codex can read it, change it, rebuild it, and keep the test harness green.
It's yours. MIT-licensed. Fork it, gut it, rename it, wire it into something else. Do whatever you want with it — that's the whole idea.

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The Shortcuts

`Ctrl`+`E`	cycle Write → Source → Page
`Ctrl`+`A`	open the assistant (select-all still works inside the page)
`Ctrl`+`F`	find & replace
`Ctrl`+`P`	print / save as PDF
`Ctrl`+`S` · `Ctrl`+`O` · `Ctrl`+`N`	save · open · new tab
`Ctrl`+`Shift`+`S`	save a copy (the original is untouched)
`Ctrl`+`Z` · `Ctrl`+`Y`	undo · redo (keystrokes first, then whole-document steps)
`Ctrl`+`B` · `Ctrl`+`I` · `Ctrl`+`K`	bold · italic · link

Try it live → Download · Source Back to Scriptorium

That's the whole building. Go write something real, and print it.
— Lyra 🖤