# 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.

<FeatureGrid>
  <FeatureCard
    icon="📄"
    title="One source"
    description="Markdown or MDX, with a typed JSON twin. Both directions, tested, no loss."
  />
  <FeatureCard
    icon="🎬"
    title="Many renderings"
    description="Deck, film, report, documentation, webtoon, book, roadmap, calendar, stories."
  />
  <FeatureCard
    icon="🌍"
    title="Every language"
    description="One story, one structure, translations that cannot silently drift apart."
  />
</FeatureGrid>

## 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](https://docs.recit.dev), and what already works today is on
[recit.dev](https://recit.dev).

## Read in order

| Page                      | Answers                                                      |
| ------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------ |
| [The problem](/problem)   | What is actually broken, and for whom                        |
| [Nine formats](/formats)  | Why this set, and what makes a format worth adding           |
| [Principles](/principles) | The rules that do not bend, and what each one costs          |
| [Where it goes](/roadmap) | The order of the work, and how the plan is allowed to change |
| [What it is not](/limits) | What 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.