Plicine documentation
Plicine is a document app for you or your team. You read and write in it the way you would in Notion or Google Docs, and send what you wrote as a finished PDF. Every document is a plain text file (markdown) in a folder you own, so it sits in your Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or iCloud like any other file, and nothing is uploaded to us.
Anything that's more than text, such as a priced table, a timeline or a dashboard, is a block: a small add-on that draws that part of the page. Plicine comes with some, and you or your agent can make more.
Said PLY-seen, to rhyme with "fly scene".
Version 0.1.0, 12 September 2026.
Where to start
Under the hood
For technical people: how a page is kept as a text file, and the plicine command.
Build for Plicine
For developers and their agents: make your own blocks and themes.
Use Plicine
For everyone. These pages are about what's on screen, and none of them needs a terminal or a look inside a file.
| Page | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Getting started | Get the app, open a folder, write a page, send it as a PDF |
| Finding your way around | The sidebar, folders, search and the buttons along the top |
| Writing and editing | Text, tables, pictures, undo |
| Blocks | The parts of a page that are more than text |
| Why a block asks before it runs | What the panel above a document is asking, and what your answer means |
| Templates | Documents with blanks to fill in, such as a letter or an agreement |
| Exporting PDFs | Page sizes, covers and what to do when a PDF looks wrong |
| Sharing a folder | Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and iCloud, and what each person sees |
| Settings | The settings that apply to every document in a folder |
| Working with an AI agent | Asking an agent to change a document while you look at it |
Under the hood
For technical people. How your documents are kept as text (markdown, with settings in YAML), and how to script Plicine from a terminal.
| Page | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Vaults | What's in the folder, and why Plicine writes next to nothing into it |
| Documents | The text format: markdown, frontmatter, block fences, links |
| How blocks work | How a name in a document finds the block that draws it |
| How themes work | What decides how a page and its PDF look |
| vault.json and frontmatter | Every setting the app reads |
| Core blocks | Every field of the built-in blocks |
| Editing the source, and what the app writes | What each click in the app changes in the file |
| CLI reference | Every command and flag |
| Template syntax and data | The full placeholder syntax, and filling templates from JSON |
| Exporting from the command line | PDFs from scripts and CI |
| Sync, the lock file and the library | What a synced folder does to a vault's files |
| The app data folder | What Plicine keeps outside your vault |
| Security | What Plicine protects, from whom, and how |
Build for Plicine
For developers and their agents. The plicine command comes inside the app, so there's nothing else to download: Plicine > Install Command-Line Tool… puts it in your terminal.
| Page | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Writing a block | From create-block to a packed, approved block |
| Writing a theme | Tokens, fonts, covers, running footers |
| Building with an AI agent | How you or your agent author and check blocks |
| The .block package | .block layout, manifest and module contract |
| The .theme package | .theme layout, tokens, CSS hooks, template variables |
What's new
Changelog lists what changed in each version. It's written for technical readers.
Made by Solunify Creations.