Phextura — Rigorous Delight
One file. Every idea has an address.
Rigorous Delight
What is Phextura?
Phextura is the phext reformulation of LaTeX — the name succeeds
LaTeX (Leslie Lamport + Donald Knuth's TeX), rebuilt on a substrate that didn't
exist in 1978. A LaTeX document is a one-dimensional character stream that a
macro expander executes. A Phextura document is a phext corpus:
plain-text scrolls at deterministic addresses in a nine-dimensional lattice
(Library.Shelf.Series / Collection.Volume.Book / Chapter.Section.Scroll).
Structure is not simulated on top of the stream. Structure is the addressing.
Fast to write
No preamble ritual, no escaping regime, no rerun-until-the-labels-settle. Write prose in scrolls, address the parts, cite by address.
Readable by humans and machines
A scroll is plain text a person can read raw — and trivially machine-readable, because its identity and role are its coordinate, not the side effects of executing it.
Everything inside the file
Graphics, media, and embedded documents of any type ride in the corpus itself. A paper can even hoist its own toolchain — a compiler, a copy of libphext, a proof checker — and carry its proofs as addressed scrolls.
Global addresses
Phextura establishes the first global address scheme for phext: addresses that are durable between Phextura files — distinct from phext addresses, which are internal to each phext. Durable global addresses are what let multiple Phextura files compose easily: cite a theorem in another paper the same way you cite one in your own, and the reference is the link.
Rigorous Delight
Every element must be both: rigorous — derivable, checkable, costed — and delightful. Rigor alone is homework. Delight alone is a toy.