~AT A GLANCE
The companion books, reference manuals, the zpwr encyclopedia, and the original novels. Every figure on this page is recomputed from the rendered deliverables by scripts/gen_report.sh — none of it is typed in.
Page Distribution — 14,826 pages
"Book" is the hand-written companion or novel; "reference" is the generated manual built from a source submodule. 41 products ship a book, 19 of them also ship a reference manual.
~THE DELIVERABLES
Each row is a rendered, shippable product. Reference manuals are generated from the public source submodules under src/; the books and novels are hand-written narrative markdown. All share one toolchain: pandoc → lualatex with the cyberpunk theme.
| Deliverable | Kind | Book pp. | Ref. pp. | Words | Chapters | Licence stated | Imprint |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| arb-registry | Book — THE INDEX | 245 | — | 98,917 | 90 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| arb | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 285 | 41 | 117,358 | 101 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| awkrs | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 408 | 58 | 186,252 | 109 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| The CLI Fleet | Book — THE CLI FLEET | 248 | — | 119,280 | 84 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| Rewriting the Desktop in Rust | Book — THE COMPANION | 247 | — | 123,182 | 73 | proprietary | MTAPP |
| Editor Plugins | Book — EDITOR PLUGINS | 294 | — | 100,298 | 150 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| elisprs | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 404 | 41 | 179,695 | 137 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| THE STACK | Novel — THE COMPILED REALM | 237 | — | 132,243 | 59 | n/a | lockup only |
| fusevm | Book — THE MACHINE | 403 | — | 186,697 | 148 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| go-rs | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 253 | 59 | 83,172 | 79 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| groovyrs | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 276 | 54 | 95,875 | 107 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| The GUI Automation Bus | Book + reference — THE BUS | 244 | 71 | 108,770 | 115 | proprietary | MTAPP |
| Firsts | Book — THE LEDGER | 240 | — | 110,956 | 72 | n/a | lockup only |
| javars | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 287 | 65 | 95,336 | 101 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| kotlinrs | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 281 | 68 | 89,467 | 101 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| node-js | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 280 | 24 | 93,352 | 110 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| phplang | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 361 | 150 | 112,117 | 96 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| powerliners | Book — THE COMPANION | 286 | — | 125,797 | 106 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| pythonrs | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 287 | 27 | 114,999 | 111 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| rlang | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 254 | 42 | 86,024 | 169 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| rubyrs | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 332 | 112 | 119,405 | 121 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| scalars | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 282 | 69 | 92,419 | 106 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| THE COMPILED MIND | Novel — AN ARK. A DYING MIND. A DEADLINE. | 240 | — | 131,966 | 52 | n/a | lockup only |
| THE WAKING FLEET | Novel — TWO SHIPS IN THE DARK. ONE STILL DYING. | 272 | — | 150,326 | 54 | n/a | lockup only |
| THE INHERITORS | Novel — THE MAKER DIES. THE MIND MUST NOT. | 251 | — | 135,813 | 51 | n/a | lockup only |
| The Stryke Ecosystem | Book — THE STRYKE ECOSYSTEM | 270 | — | 105,290 | 137 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| stryke | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 382 | 1,270 | 180,510 | 221 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| The Studio | Book — THE STUDIO | 255 | — | 123,882 | 61 | proprietary | MTAUDIO |
| tclrs | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 285 | 52 | 111,661 | 223 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| The Operator | Book — THE COMPANION | 306 | — | 125,204 | 232 | n/a | MTAPP |
| vimlrs | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 396 | 60 | 195,162 | 97 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| zdbview | Book — THE COMPANION | 244 | — | 81,017 | 92 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| zmax-native | Book — THE PLUGIN GUIDE | 245 | — | 78,022 | 89 | MPL-2.0 | MTOPENSOURCE |
| zmax | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 431 | 207 | 170,945 | 181 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| znative | Book — THE MANAGER | 259 | — | 106,130 | 122 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| zpwr | Book — THE ENCYCLOPEDIA | 405 | — | 121,013 | 129 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| zshrs | Book + reference — THE COMPANION | 410 | 203 | 200,537 | 142 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| zterminal | Book — THE COMPANION | 281 | — | 117,844 | 106 | proprietary | MTAPP |
| ztmux: tmux, Rewritten in Rust | Book — THE SUPERSET | 239 | — | 123,487 | 75 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| zvcs | Book — THE SUPERSET | 250 | — | 92,366 | 100 | MIT | MTOPENSOURCE |
| zwire | Book — THE COMPANION | 298 | — | 140,151 | 110 | MIT | MTAPP |
| 60 deliverables | 41 books + 19 reference manuals | 12,153 | 2,673 | — | — | 41 pages | — |
~ATTRIBUTION
Every book opens on a Copyright and Attribution chapter written in docs/front-matter.md: what the software is licensed under, where its source lives, what upstream it ports or forks, and under what terms that upstream is distributed. The reference builds render the same markdown to LaTeX, so a product's book and its manual carry one attribution text from one file.
One source, two artifacts
book_pdf.sh prepends docs/front-matter.md and passes no --toc, because pandoc emits the contents ahead of the body and that put the contents before the copyright page. reference_pdf.sh renders the same markdown to LaTeX and passes it as --include-before-body. Order in both: title page, copyright, contents.
Stated, not implied
Licence and repository are read from each product's own LICENSE and git remote, so the proprietary stack is described as UNLICENSED rather than left to look permissive. Fork points are quoted from the repo that records them — zmax names its Helix commit and version.
Vendored upstreams named
15 of the 41 pages name a vendored tree and the terms it carries, and only where such a tree exists in the repository. A page says "independent implementation" where that is what the code is, rather than claiming a lineage it does not have.
Imprint marks per branch
The marks signing the foot of each copyright page come from the book's own theme, so they track the product: the app branch for the desktop and browser fleet, the audio branch for the studio, the parent lockup alone for the novels and the ledger, the open-source branch for the rest.
0 reference manuals still carry their previous copyright page. Their builds regenerate reference.html from a source submodule first, and where that submodule's worktree has moved ahead of the commit this repo pins, the regenerated corpus is smaller than the manual on record — so those rebuilds were discarded rather than shipped. They pick the page up unchanged once the submodules sit at their pinned commits.
~TYPESETTING
Overfull boxes are horizontal overflows past the text block. tests/run.sh asserts zero over 5pt under BUILD=1; the figures here come from a full lualatex pass over every book, scanned 2026-08-13.
| Book | Boxes > 5pt | Worst |
|---|---|---|
| editor-plugins | 1 | 126.7pt |
| the-operator | 1 | 25.4pt |
Every other book measured clean at this threshold.
~THE NOVELS
THE STACK is a high-tech fantasy whose world is a literalization of the stack. The Deep Time Trilogy — The Compiled Mind → The Waking Fleet → The Inheritors — is its hard-SF sibling: a generation ship dying of the heat shed by an interpreted mind that forks a disposable process for every act, the compiled successor that replaces it, and the long work of making it outlast its maker.
| Title | Words | Pages | Headings |
|---|---|---|---|
| THE STACK | 132,243 | 237 | 59 |
| THE COMPILED MIND | 131,966 | 240 | 52 |
| THE WAKING FLEET | 150,326 | 272 | 54 |
| THE INHERITORS | 135,813 | 251 | 51 |
| 4 novels | 550,348 | 1,000 | 216 |
Headings counts every top-level # in the manuscript, so it includes the front sections and any prologue or epilogue alongside the numbered chapters.
~THE PIPELINE
One toolchain renders every deliverable.
pandoc → lualatex
Narrative markdown (or generated reference) in; book.{tex,pdf} out. extreport class with --top-level-division=chapter so each # heading becomes a neon \chapter page.
Cyberpunk theme
Shared palette across PDF and HTML: #05050A bg, neon cyan / magenta / pink / green. Orbitron headings, Share Tech Mono code, Arimo body — loaded per-glyph with a luaotfload fallback chain so no arrow or box-drawing glyph ever drops.
Screen and print
Every book renders twice from one source: the dark screen edition, and a -print KDP interior where the palette is flipped to a grayscale ramp on white so the proof matches what a black-ink press produces. Geometry is identical, so pagination is too.
Overflow guards
fvextra breaklines, xurl, and a robust breakable \texttt keep code and long identifiers inside the margin. tests/run.sh asserts the result under BUILD=1.
Web rendition
Each novel also ships a single-file book.html (book_html.sh, pandoc → html5) with the same theme embedded — same source, two outputs.
Versioned source
Reference content comes from the public source submodules under src/; bump a submodule and re-run the generators to rebuild a manual against newer source. Books that have no submodule carry an EDITION string instead of a crate version.