Write once, tell it everywhere

A talk, a launch video, a quarterly report, a chapter, a webtoon episode and a product roadmap look like six different jobs. They are usually six different tools, six copies of the same facts, and six moments where one copy quietly stops matching the others.

Récit starts from the opposite assumption: these are six ways of telling one thing. The thing is written once, in Markdown, and the format is a rendering decision — taken later, changed later, taken twice if the same story has to be both a deck and a film.

📄

One source

Markdown or MDX, with a typed JSON twin. Both directions, tested, no loss.

🎬

Many renderings

Deck, film, report, documentation, webtoon, book, roadmap, calendar, stories.

🌍

Every language

One story, one structure, translations that cannot silently drift apart.

The claim, stated so it can be wrong

A format is not a product. It is a function of a story, and the story is the thing worth owning. Everything that follows is a consequence:

  • if a format is a function, a story must survive being rendered twice — so the same source gives a deck and a film, and the bridges between formats are features, not exports;
  • if the source is the thing worth owning, it must be readable and diffable by a human and typed for a machine — so every Markdown story has a JSON twin, and neither is the real one;
  • if the source outlives the tool, no rendering may require the tool to be present — so a deck exports to a single HTML file, a report to PDF, a film to MP4.

This site says where that leads and what it costs. It is not documentation: nothing here explains how to do anything. The how is on docs.recit.dev, and what already works today is on recit.dev.

Read in order

PageAnswers
The problemWhat is actually broken, and for whom
Nine formatsWhy this set, and what makes a format worth adding
PrinciplesThe rules that do not bend, and what each one costs
Where it goesThe order of the work, and how the plan is allowed to change
What it is notWhat Récit refuses to do, and what it will probably never do

Honest status

Récit is early, and not published on npm yet. Two formats are real today — deck and motion — the documentation format comes from the site framework, and the other six are specified but not built. The roadmap says which is which, and this site never writes about a format as if it already existed.