Xerdi xerdi.com

Work

Evidence, not adjectives

A capability list costs nothing to write. These are the problems we were actually handed, and what changed as a result.

Selected work

  • Float stabilisation for a production typesetting engine

    A scientific publishing technology supplier

    A LuaLaTeX pipeline that placed figures and tables unpredictably at volume: correct on a page, wrong across a run. We stabilised the float behaviour so that the same input produces the same page every time, which is what makes an automated run reviewable at all.

    LuaLaTeXTypesetting engineReproducibility

  • A compliance knowledge base that keeps its provenance

    A regulatory-compliance venture

    Regulatory material — AI Act, GDPR, GxP — assembled into a corpus that can be searched and cited. The design rule was that a retrieved answer must always be traceable to the passage it came from: deterministic where the answer is a fact, human-validated where it is a judgement.

    Corpus engineeringRetrievalRegulatory text

  • XDP — the document platform behind all of it

    Xerdi

    A LuaLaTeX document framework with a validated data/schema separation: a recipe declares the fields a document accepts, a payload supplies them, and a document that is handed the wrong data fails to build instead of printing it. Every quote, invoice and handbook Xerdi issues is produced by it.

    LuaLaTeXSchema validationPDF/A-4fReproducible builds

  • The composer: documents generated on demand

    Xerdi

    A web front end that takes a filled-in form and returns a finished PDF, generated by the same pipeline that produces our own documents. Generation runs in an isolated container with no network and a hard time limit, because the alternative — a typesetter running on visitor input inside the web application — is a shell-escape waiting to happen.

    On-demand generationSandboxingWeb application

Why some clients are not named

Naming a client on a public page is their decision, not ours. Where we have their agreement on record, we name them. Where we do not, the work is described without them — which costs a little credibility and is still the right way round.

If you are a client and would like your project named here, or named differently, tell us and it changes.

Yours could be the next one

Most of this work started as a document that kept going wrong. Send us yours.

Write to Erik