Lixity

See where your manuscript changes. Read before you revise.

Lixity is a local manuscript analysis tool for authors, editors and researchers. Compare sentence rhythm, vocabulary, dialogue and tense across chapters, then open paragraphs to read the text and local measurements. Ask whether a change serves the scene before deciding what to keep or revise.

Try the report · Three-minute first look · Install · What you can do · v0.7.1 release notes

Try it in 30 seconds

Open the synthetic report, select a chapter cell and open a paragraph. No install, account or upload is needed. Also explore Effi Briest, Pride and Prejudice or the read-only research workspace. Examples use invented or public-domain text.

Built-in analysis runs on your computer. Optional external OCR workers have separate data boundaries.

Install and start

Install uv, then run on Windows, macOS or Linux:

uv tool install --python 3.12 --managed-python lixity
uv tool update-shell

Open a new terminal, verify lixity --version, then run lixity service start --open. Choose Open Project or Analyze a manuscript. The first-project guide explains the workflow; installation and updates covers launchers, pinned wheels, service management and removal. Restart the workspace after upgrading.

What you can do

More screenshots and short walkthroughs show desktop and mobile views, paragraph notes, settings and the research timeline.

Research with Zotero

Use Zotero for collecting sources, reading and general research notes. Lixity's experimental workspace retains selected evidence and connects it to authored claims, decisions and manuscript quotes. A dossier gathers a topic or scene; images and structured geography can accompany it. Changing a Zotero attachment does not change an already retained quotation. An integrity check is not a fact check.

Try the research example · Workflows and compatibility · Places and journeys

Since v0.7.1: edit an exported dossier in Markdown, review its changes against the archive and apply the prepared revision explicitly. Images and diagrams share a zoom viewer; geography starts offline, with optional OpenStreetMap tiles. Literal character aliases and declared viewpoint chapters keep name counts separate from author-declared perspective.

How to read the results

Measurements describe patterns, not literary quality. A deliberate change of voice may differ from the book's baseline. Read the passage before revising; short samples and missing measurements can leave comparisons unavailable. Interpretation, methods and validation limits explain the models and what their results can support.

Read the workflows: Intentional registers · Local word echoes.

Supported languages

English and German have the broadest analysis resources. French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch also have localized interfaces and narrower heuristic coverage. Choose the manuscript language explicitly; documentation and terminal presentation are separate. Language settings and limits.

Documentation map

• Practical guides — installation, interpretation, research and comparisons with other tools.
• First project · Installation and updates.
• CLI workflows — use lixity --help and lixity COMMAND --help for the installed commands and options.
• Automation contracts · Research workflows.
• Methods · Stability · Architecture · Localization.
• Agent index · Full documentation bundle.

Current release

The current release is v0.7.1, continuing the pre-1.0 development line; historical v3.0.1 and earlier tags remain available. Product and schema versions are independent. This release reads research archives through v8; geographic saves opt into v8, which older readers cannot open. See Release notes for compatibility and upgrading from historical numbering, and the changelog for subsequent work on main.

Python API and automation

from lixity import api

html = api.dashboard(text, language="de", project_config={})

CLI, Python and dashboard analysis share one pipeline. Pass explicit project settings for multi-project integrations and inspect lixity about --json for installed capabilities. Interface contracts define result schemas; architecture explains reusing one analysis result for several outputs.

Research

Matthias Fahsold developed Lixity as an architect and developer at ROST Services GmbH and used it while writing his own debut novel. The methods and the tool's placement among stylometry and corpus tools are described in the software paper draft under paper/, prepared for the Journal of Open Source Software. Released versions are archived on Zenodo: cite the concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23390297 (see CITATION.cff); every release also receives its own version DOI.

License

Lixity is open source under the AGPL-3.0-or-later. Use it freely for private and commercial writing, research and teaching — including self-publishing your book; no extra permission is needed. If you distribute Lixity or a modified version, the AGPL requires that recipients receive the corresponding source under the same license.

A separate written commercial license is available for integrations that cannot meet the AGPL, for example embedding Lixity in a closed-source product or running a modified version as a network service without releasing its source.

Licensing guide · Full AGPL text · Former LNCL-1.0 text · Commercial enquiries

Maintainer: Matthias Fahsold, Hamburg, Germany. Project operator: ROST Services GmbH, Rümpel, Germany. Legal notice.

Contributing · Report a security concern · Sample-text provenance