Aldina

An open-source engine for producing documents — letters, reports, decks, invoices and one-pagers — that come out on-brand and print-grade. You bring content and a theme; Aldina lays out the page. Built on ChoirMark, an open document format.

How it works

Aldina takes a resolved ChoirMark document (roles assigned) and runs a fixed pipeline:

ChoirMark → compose (into a theme grammar) → gate (admit / reject) → project (PDF)

Layout is deterministic wherever it can be, with bounded LLM checkpoints (role inference, deck routing, repair) reserved for the steps that genuinely need judgment. The gate is the heart of it: it admits only pages that pass hard checks — fit, contrast, hierarchy — so a page that doesn't measure up is rejected rather than shipped.

See ARCHITECTURE.md for how the engine is built and the ChoirMark spec for the source format.

Usage

npm install -g aldina

aldina report.cmk                       # PDF beside the source
aldina report.cmk --theme leipzig       # choose a theme
aldina report.cmk --html forme.html     # emit the forme instead
aldina resolve notes.md -o report.cmk   # loose markdown to a resolved .cmk (LLM)
aldina themes                           # list what is installed

The document's class comes from its front matter, not a flag. Run aldina <source.cmk> -h for the full set of make options.

Requires a headless Chromium on the PATH (or set CHROMIUM) for the gate and PDF projection.

As a service

aldina serve exposes the same pipeline over HTTP, so a renderer can sit behind your own API:

aldina serve --port 4010
aldina serve --socket /run/aldina/render.sock

POST /render with { source, theme, from } returns the gate verdict, the findings, and the PDF when the page is admitted. A refused page returns the reasons and no PDF, because output that has not passed the gate is not output. GET /health reports the theme allowlist and current load.

The Dockerfile in this repo builds a self-contained image (Node, Chromium, the themes) running exactly that.

Themes

Themes live in themes/. A theme is tokens + a per-class grammar that targets ChoirMark roles ([data-role]) — Zen Garden at the role layer. A new role or class is a ChoirMark spec change, never a theme feature; that's what keeps the interface stable.

Four of them are showcase themes, each covering all five classes with its own typographic register: leipzig (authority), ulm (systematic), siena (humanist) and parma (editorial). basel is the plain reference implementation. See THEME-AUTHORING.md to write your own; the gate is the contract.

License

Dual-licensed: AGPL-3.0-or-later for the engine and base themes, with a commercial license available for uses the AGPL doesn't fit. See LICENSING.md; contributions are governed by CLA.md.

aldina.io · choirmark.org