pandulipi

Pandulipi (Sanskrit पाण्डुलिपि: a manuscript — literally a pale-ochre writing, the sheet before it is a book). The typescript as an editor expects to receive it, and nothing beyond that: twelve-point monospace with Courier named first and the family names left as data a consumer may override, double-spaced, one-inch margins on a US Letter page and A4 by one option that switches the @page size VALUE and not one other character of the sheet; a title page carrying the author's contact block top-left verbatim and the word count top-right rounded to the nearest hundred, with the exact count riding beside it so the convention loses nothing; the title a third of the way down and the by-line beneath it; every chapter beginning a third of the way down a fresh page; a scene break set as one centred hash, whether it was written as a hash, three stars or three spaced stars; paragraphs indented half an inch with no blank line between them; italics kept as italics, underline one option away and one CSS rule wide. THE TEXT IS NEVER ALTERED, and that is the whole carefulness of it: every literal run of the source is recorded with its byte offsets and is a byte-exact slice, every character no run covers is one of a declared markup alphabet so a dropped word would stand in a gap as its own letters, and markdown the dialect does not set rides as its own characters, never mended — no smart quotes, no folded ellipsis, no dash substitution, no collapsed whitespace, no corrected typo. THE PAGE COUNT IS THE PRINT ENGINE'S: the running head is one @page margin box with a CSS counter in it, upper-cased by CSS so no case change touches the text, and the result declares `pages` and never sets it. No glyph typesetting, no hyphenation, no kerning, and no widow or orphan rule claimed or written. No clock, no disk, no network, no host global, zero imports: a manuscript in, one paged HTML out.