Concepts

Six ideas that explain why everything else works the way it does.


Spec format	The JSON document that is your document. Everything else (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, PDF) is a derived artefact.
Themes	One file that controls typography, palette, page geometry, components, and chart colours across all formats.
Charts	Dual-emission — native chart parts where the library supports them, ECharts SVG image fallback otherwise.
Ingestion + fidelity	Reading existing documents into the spec model, with honest reporting about what survived and what didn't.
Templates	Register a `.docx` with `{{ placeholders }}`, fill it with structured data.
Auth + quotas	How tenants authenticate, what limits apply, where to inspect usage.

Mental model in one paragraph#

The spec is the canonical state — a JSON document describing what to render. ScaiScribe stores specs in its database and applies edits as PATCH operations against them. Binaries (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx, .pdf) are derived by feeding the spec + a theme through format-specific renderers. Ingestion runs the same process in reverse: it parses an uploaded binary into a spec, surfacing structural loss as fidelity warnings. The whole loop is byte-stable enough that ScaiScribe-authored documents round-trip equivalently via an embedded JSON breadcrumb at scaiscribe/breadcrumbs.json in the zip.

That's it. Pick any subsection and dive in.