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Scribe

Scientific writing studio with agent-assisted LaTeX, revisions and PDF builds.

Details:

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Install

alisio install npm:@alisio/plugin-scribe@0.3.5

Metadata

Package	@alisio/plugin-scribe
Version	0.3.5
Published	Nov 10, 2026
Author	Alisio
License	MIT
Categories	Tools, UI
Size	126.9 MB
Dependencies	3
Peer dependencies	1
Downloads (last month)	776
Source	First-party
Keywords	alisio-plugin, latex, scientific-writing, ui

Security note: Plugins run in-process with your user privileges and are not sandboxed. Review the source before installing a third-party plugin.

Español: README.es.md. Both READMEs must be updated together.

Scientific writing studio for Alisio: multiple LaTeX documents, agent-generated proposals that you review before they become revisions, attachments, revision history and offline PDF builds with a bundled TeX engine. It does not start another server, open a browser window or ask for provider credentials.

Requirements

• Node >=22.16.
• Alisio 0.11.6 or newer for the full studio. The plugin apps API (api.apps) arrived in 0.11.5, and 0.11.6 lets studio actions ask for approval like the chat: drafting needs write and building a PDF needs process. Alisio shows the usual prompt (allow once, allow for the session, deny); a denied or read-only session makes the studio say which permission is missing.
• On older hosts (no api.apps), Scribe still loads: it registers the scribe_documents tool, the read-only documents view, the agents/skills and the help command, and skips the studio. Since documents are created only from the studio, the tool and view stay empty there and help says that the studio is unavailable.

Install

alisio install npm:@alisio/plugin-scribe

Open a trusted project and select Scribe · Writing / Scribe · Redacción in the Apps group above Projects. The projects panel remains available; Back to chat restores the conversation.

How it integrates

• api.apps.register supplies a self-contained HTML bundle (dist/embedded.html, built from web/) and declared read, write and process action handlers.
• The host mounts it in a sandboxed iframe (opaque origin, no forms, no network). Its one inline script carries the host nonce; PDF.js renders previews with a blob: worker, without eval or WASM, from bytes returned by an action.
• The frame accepts only the first alisio.app.connect port from window.parent and sends every action over it to Alisio's authenticated server, never directly to providers. It keeps fewer than 8 requests in flight and pauses polling while hidden. When the host answers not_found, the studio re-checks once after a short delay; only if the app is still missing (for example after the plugin is disabled) does it show an unavailable state, which has a Try again button and re-checks whenever the studio is shown again.
• Long work (agent drafts and PDF builds) returns a job at once and the studio polls it, so no action holds the host's 30-second request limit.
• The host gates every action by its effect with the session's existing permissions, without a prompt: mutating actions, including job cancellation, need write permission and PDF builds also need process permission.
• The Alisio locale controls all UI labels (English/Spanish); the studio has no language selector of its own. Manuscript language is separate.
• The backend uses Alisio sessions, model configuration, tool permissions and private state paths.

Features

Multiple documents; physics/mathematics/computing starting points; model selection; agent-generated LaTeX proposals; explicit review/apply/discard; manual LaTeX/BibTeX editing; revision conflict checks; history/restore; attachments; document search/archive; JSON project import/export; .tex import; source ZIP export; PDF build jobs, cancellation and downloads; ES/EN messages.

Configuration

Set pluginOverrides["alisio.scribe"].options through Alisio configuration:

Option	Meaning
locale	"es" or "en"; default locale reported to the studio.
allowedTools	Explicit existing effective tool names available to the child agent; empty by default.

Tools from other plugins go through the existing agent runner; this plugin does not import other plugins or bypass their effect gates. Child sessions deny write and process permissions; an allowlist never grants privileges absent from their parent.

PDF compilation

Scribe uses Tectonic 0.16.9. No Docker or system TeX is needed.

• Linux x64: the package ships the static (musl) upstream build at compiler/linux-x64/tectonic, so builds work on any x86_64 Linux, glibc or musl (including Ubuntu 22.04 and Debian 12). If that file is missing, Scribe falls back to the node-tectonic binary, which needs glibc 2.39 or newer; on older systems PDF builds then fail with a build error.
• Windows x64, Linux arm64 and macOS x64/arm64: the platform binary of node-tectonic 1.1.0, installed automatically (Linux arm64 is already a static build). Do not omit optional dependencies when installing.

The package contains a 106 MB compressed offline TeX archive (compiler/bundle.zip): a TeX Live 2023 subset with LaTeX (recommended and extra), English, Spanish, Portuguese, French and German, mathematics and science (including siunitx and algorithm packages), graphics (tikz, pgfplots), bibliographies (biblatex with the BibTeX backend, natbib), recommended fonts and XeTeX font support. To stay within npm's package size limit it leaves out Type1 copies of fonts that XeTeX reads as OpenType (cm-super, Libertine, TeX Gyre), AFM metrics, MetaPost data and a few image-heavy novelty packages (see scripts/tex-bundle-excludes.txt). The first build creates the LaTeX format cache; later builds reuse it. Builds never download packages or send document contents anywhere. Before compiling, Scribe checks the document's classes, packages and babel languages against compiler/bundle-manifest.json and names anything missing. Packages outside the snapshot, biber and LuaLaTeX-only templates are not supported. The archive is produced by the maintainer script scripts/vendor-tex-bundle.py; end users never run it.

Tectonic runs with --untrusted, a private temporary directory, a minimal allowlisted environment (path, home, temp, locale and cache variables only), a 180-second timeout, bounded log and PDF size, and cancellation. It is a native process under Alisio's process permission, not an OS sandbox. PDF.js is bundled for in-editor previews. See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and the archive's LICENSES directory for TeX and font licenses.

Persistence and limits

Atomic JSON storage (and atomic PDF writes) per workspace with an in-process write queue. Run one host process per Scribe state directory. A stored document that cannot be read is skipped (with a process warning) instead of breaking the document list. Jobs are persisted and marked interrupted after restart, never replayed. Idempotency covers retries within the running process only.

The same limits apply when editing and when importing, so every exported project can be imported:

Limit	Value
Single attachment	25 MiB
All attachments of a document	100 MiB, at most 200 files
Revisions kept	200 (older revisions are pruned when a new one is added)
LaTeX source / bibliography	400,000 / 100,000 characters per revision
Project file selected in the studio	256 MiB

Binary attachments are not OCR-extracted or passed to the model. References require human verification.

Development

pnpm --filter @alisio/plugin-scribe build
pnpm --filter @alisio/plugin-scribe typecheck
pnpm --filter @alisio/plugin-scribe test

Tests run with Vitest against src, including jsdom tests of the studio UI and its handshake, and a check that the built page meets the frame CSP. The real-engine PDF test is skipped when no Tectonic binary can run on the current machine.

Both vendored files are git-ignored (too large for the repository) and must exist before packing:

cd packages/plugin-scribe
# 1. A portable TeX Live 2023 subset in a scratch directory (no root access, nothing system-wide).
TL=/absolute/scratch/tl2023
REPO=https://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/historic/systems/texlive/2023/tlnet-final
curl -fLO $REPO/install-tl-unx.tar.gz && tar xzf install-tl-unx.tar.gz
sed "s|@TEXDIR@|$TL|g" scripts/texlive-2023.profile > "$TL.profile"
perl install-tl-*/install-tl --no-interaction --profile "$TL.profile" --repository $REPO
# 2. The flat bundle and its manifest (also takes the generated font maps and language.dat).
python3 scripts/vendor-tex-bundle.py $TL/texmf-dist
# 3. The static Tectonic binary for linux-x64.
node scripts/vendor-tectonic.mjs       # compiler/linux-x64/tectonic, checksum-verified download

vendor-tex-bundle.py leaves out what Tectonic never reads (listed in scripts/tex-bundle-excludes.txt) and fails if two different files would share a name in the flat archive. compiler/bundle-manifest.json is small and committed; compiler/bundle.zip is not.

vendor-tectonic.mjs downloads the pinned upstream release asset, verifies the tarball and binary SHA-256 digests and writes the binary atomically; --from uses a local copy instead. scripts/verify-host-integration.mjs exercises the plugin inside a locally built Alisio that ships the plugin apps API.

License

MIT