Lixity · Documentation

What's new in Lixity: numbers you can compare, evidence that survives edits

Posted · 7 minutes · Blog

Lixity is a local-first manuscript analysis tool: it reads a novel on your own computer, shows the rhythm, vocabulary, dialogue and tense behind every result — and keeps the research behind your decisions in one workspace. This release line is about two kinds of trust: numbers you can actually compare, and evidence that does not silently rot while you edit.

Small chapters no longer shout

Short texts are noisy. A three-sentence stage note can look extreme in a z-score table — not because the writing is extreme, but because three sentences are simply not much to measure. So comparisons now have a floor, and they tell you when they cannot say something useful:

Where a value is withheld, the interface explains why — in all seven supported languages. If you have older reports, rebuild them once before comparing; the new numbers are honest, the old ones were optimistic.

On the same theme: sentence counting now respects blank-line boundaries. A salutation, a stage note or a sign-off stays one unit, and chapter rhythm, scene units and the corpus statistics finally agree with each other.

The dashboard notices when your manuscript changed

The local dashboard checks your manuscript when the page loads. If the file changed on disk since the last build, it rebuilds itself instead of showing yesterday’s numbers with today’s confidence.

Quotes that survive your edits

Research links between a source quote and a claim are stored as exact anchors — the quote, the paragraph, the line range. Editing is normal, so the review view now tells two cases apart:

Small thing, same spirit: you can now type a plain hyphen between years (1929-1933). Lixity reads it as the range you meant.

A calmer research workspace

The research side keeps sources, dossiers, claims, decisions and evidence in one local archive. Recent polish:

One look, everywhere

The interface had collected a decade of small decisions: ten border radii, fifteen font sizes between 0.72 and 0.84 rem, three different spinners, two kinds of tabs. That is now one small system:

Logs you can actually find

Diagnostics now go through one logging setup: one line format, standard levels, and a log file that stays bounded (older entries are rotated, not deleted silently). --debug, LIXITY_DEBUG and LIXITY_LOG_LEVEL choose how much you see, and lixity service status prints the path. Request logs keep the route but never the query string, so research context and project tokens stay out of the file — and log records never contain manuscript text.

Your privacy, in plain words

Lixity runs on your computer. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and the browser page only runs the scripts that ship with it (that is what the strict Content Security Policy means). Loopback bind, host allow-list, payload limits and explicit non-goals are written down in the project’s SECURITY.md. The statistical signals support your review; they are not a quality score, and they are not an instruction to rewrite your prose.

Try it

If you try it: tell me which passage surprised you — that is the feedback that shapes the next release.