How this site is built, and how it counts.

One declared rule per piece

Each research page states once, near the top, what its marks mean, then holds that rule to the end. The rule is derived from the subject, so no two pieces share one. The corpus figure obeys the same convention: one square is 500 words, solid is independent, an open outline is coursework.

Colour

Chart colours come from a validated categorical palette, checked for lightness band, chroma floor, colour-vision separation and contrast against both the light and the dark surface before use. Colour never carries meaning on its own: every figure's numbers are restated in a table or in the running text, and every mark that means something also differs in fill or shape.

Typography

Inter Variable, subset to the 267 characters the corpus actually uses and self-hosted at 80,976 bytes, with a metric-matched fallback face so the page does not reflow when the font lands. If the file fails to load, the site keeps working on the system stack. The build fails on any page character the subset lacks, so the number above is checked rather than believed.

A number you can open

A counted number on these pages is set with a dotted underline. Pointing at it or pressing it shows the definition it was counted under, the file it was measured from, the script that measured it and the record that holds it. The totals sit in the Tab order; a number inside a row opens with a pointer only, so a keyboard reader is not made to stop at every figure of every row, and what its dialog would say is the row's own link and the definition above. With scripts off the number stands as text and the definitions are the list above; nothing about the number itself depends on the script.

Surfaces

Warm paper in light, a near-black ground in dark, hairline rules, no rounded corners. The shell pages paint no drop shadow; the search panel sits on the browser's own backdrop. On a piece a shadow sits only under what floats over its text: the contents drawer on a phone, the reading-position pill, the section menu and the tips; a piece's own sheet keeps whatever it declared. One accent, blue, for the independent work on the sphere and for links. A second accent, violet, means one thing: a link one document's prose makes to another. It is the colour of the chords on both spheres, of the key entry that names them, of the link counts in the sphere's card and of the one count of recorded links under the home sphere, and it appears nowhere else; it is violet because no figure on this site has spent that hue. A panel sits one step above the ground behind a one-pixel edge. The one gradient on the site is the light around the sphere, which encodes nothing and is drawn outside the disc so it darkens no mark. Dark mode is a selected set of tokens rather than an inversion, and the manual toggle wins over the system setting in both directions.

The thumb index

A generated page with three or more parts carries tabs on its right edge, one for each section head in the order the page sets them, the way a bound reference is cut on its fore-edge so a reader can open it at a part. The build reads the tabs off the finished page, so each says only what its heading says, and it gives a heading an address where it had none. The tab for the part being read is pulled: inked, and held a few pixels proud of the others. At rest the index stands in the margin and covers no text; a tab draws out to show its heading only while it is pointed at or focused, and a screen wide enough to hold the headings shows them at rest. The tabs are plain links, so they work with scripts off. The Atlas and the controls page are instruments of their own and carry none.

1. No piece loads a typeface from another origin: every face the site uses is self-hosted, subset to the characters each piece shows, and the build fails on any character a subset lacks.
2. 14 pieces render under 1,200 words. They are counted in every total and not drawn in the corpus figure; together they hold 7,962 words.
3. 3 run transcripts are measured, held to the same record as every piece, and kept in the offline copy, but not listed and not counted in the corpus line: crucible-run-0-transcript, crucible-run-b-transcript, crucible-run-c-transcript. Together they hold 166,808 words, so the site as a whole carries 678,796 measured words over 72 documents; the corpus line counts the 69 pieces.
4. The 8 interactive tools stand on the shelf of the course or research that produced them and on the tools shelf. Every total counts each of them once.

The identity is drawn rather than typed: a monogram whose A and R stand on one vertical datum, in the header of every generated page, on the bar at the top of every standalone piece, and in the tab icon. In the header it holds two layers. At rest it draws the 4 strokes of the letters; point at it or reach it with a keyboard and it draws the 5 construction elements those letters were measured from, which are the circle the A sits in, the datum both letters stand on, and the ticks at the apex and the two feet. The other two marks stand where they mean something. The delta heads the tests of controls because its own sequence is that page's: evidence, a change, a verified datum, a ledger record. The polar datum heads the Atlas and stands beside the author's name because it is this site's own sphere abstracted, and the filled node at its north pole is the author's mark among the 1,755 on that sphere.

A stroke renders at its width times the size it is drawn, over the 64 unit grid the marks are authored on, so a line thinner than one device pixel cannot hold an edge. Each surface therefore draws only what it can hold and multiplies every stroke it keeps by one factor. The thinnest line any surface draws measures 1.01 device pixels. Nothing is resized by the stylesheet, because a mark scaled after the fact would be a mark whose arithmetic was done for another size.

The seal is the same discipline closed into a medallion: the monogram at its centre, a type band on a real arc, and a calibration band of 24 stations exactly 15 degrees apart, 20 of them fine ticks, 3 cardinal rules, and the north station left to the observer rather than drawn as a tick. The sheet intends divisions every 15 degrees for the polar datum and that file carries them every 45; this one carries them every 15. Of its 40 elements the site draws 39: the innermost ring is 0.5 units and could not hold an edge at any size this site uses, so it is dropped rather than drawn as a smear.

Six further glyphs carry the state of a claim rather than the identity of the site. They are authored on a 24 unit grid at stroke 1.25, which renders at 1.04 and 1.25 device pixels at the two sizes this site draws them, so unlike the brand marks they need no factor at all. They head the columns of the whole statement, and they say what a column is before a reader has read a single number in it.

Every row of the whole statement also carries a figure of its own document, built from four values this build measured: the outer radius from the word count, one calibration ray per table, one node per figure, and one chord per recorded link between that document and another on this site. There is no random source anywhere in it, so the same document draws the same figure on every build, and a figure that changes means one of those four values changed.

A layer is drawn only where its value is, and one of them is thin on the ground: of the 69 figures, 53 carry rays and 22 carry nodes, 31 belong to a document with a recorded link, and 6 draw a chord. A chord joins two of the ring's nodes, so a document with fewer than two figures has nowhere to put one however many links it records. That is the arithmetic the figure was specified with, kept as specified rather than widened to make the layer show up more often.

The marks arrived with a sheet of stated geometry. 16 of its values are readings this build takes from the files themselves, and 13 of those readings bear the sheet out. The rest do not, so the site draws the files: the sheet gives the monogram's bowl a radius the path does not describe, sets the delta's two ledger rules closer together than they sit, and asks the polar datum for finer angular divisions than it carries. Below, 15 dimensions of the monogram and the polar datum, each one read off a vertex or an arc boundary of the shipped path data rather than copied from the sheet. Check 34 recomputes what the pages draw on every build without asking the module that drew it, and check 35 walks these 15 readings a second time, with its own reader, and refuses the build if the two walks disagree.