Grown, not assembled

November 2026

Open the typesetting tool in Drazil and press compile. Somewhere in your tab, a real TeX Live 2025 XeLaTeX is running — not a rendering of what LaTeX would say, the actual machinery, WebAssembly, references resolved by real reruns. Nobody else ships that in a browser tab next to a PDF merger and a study calendar, and the reason is simple: it was grown, not bought.

Why this is hard

A browser is a hostile place to be a compiler. There is no filesystem, no processes, no luck about memory, and no backend to hide behind. Drazil's engines route around those walls the way all local-first software does: slowly, on purpose, one wall at a time. The text-to-PDF engine is written from scratch — its own parser, line breaker, pagination loop and maths layout — because the honest way to promise "your file never leaves this tab" is to have nothing to send. TeX runs as WebAssembly with 672 bundled packages, and the ones a document actually needs get fetched by name through this site's own origin, never with your document's contents attached.

Why it matters

The alternative to a local engine is a server, and a server is a privacy posture, a pricing model and a business plan all at once. Every "free" tool that uploads your file has to pay for the upload somehow — storage, scanning, a use for whatever it scanned. Drazil's answer is to not have the server: no accounts, no uploads, no logs of your documents, nothing to breach because there is nothing kept. Your work lands in an IndexedDB library on your machine, and the escape hatch is a plain JSON export you download yourself.

What that buys you

• Typesetting that outlasts the tab — a properly formed PDF, not a print of a web page.
• Study tools that remember — flashcards that schedule their own reviews, quizzes built from your own notes, exam mode with the clock and the honest mistake analysis.
• A video that renders on your CPU — Praxis turns a lesson into an animated, narrated, captioned video with no subscription and no cloud credits.
• Forty-four tools sharing one library — a highlight in the reader can become a card, a note, a quiz and a revision deck without ever crossing a network.

What it costs

About $1 a month for the domain. The builder's machine time, which is why releases arrive in the small hours. The discipline of never adding a "just this once" upload. None of it is dramatic, and all of it is the point. See the economics page — every number on it is real.

This is what "grown, not assembled" means: nothing here is a wrapper around someone else's service with a thin skin of branding. It is one long, slightly mad, deliberately private act of engineering, maintained in public, build by build.