Your first document

A writing tool with provenance

Red Stet is a writing tool that can prove a person wrote what they wrote. When you signed up, you opted into the recording layer — that's the consent. It runs in the background as you write, capturing plain-text events inside the editor (keystrokes, pauses, paste actions, cursor moves) and sealing them into a portable receipt you can hand to an editor, publisher, or verifier later.

What gets captured is the editing window and nothing else. No microphone. No camera. No screenshots. No screen recording. No clipboard contents from other apps. No keystrokes outside this editor window. The receipt is a sequence of typed characters, timestamps, and cursor positions.

The recording stays with you by default. To share authorship proof, export a signed .red.md bundle and hand it to whoever needs it; the standalone verifier at redstet.com/verify opens it offline. If you want to write a specific doc without a receipt, flip the per-doc recording switch off — your account-level setting stays on, but that one doc accumulates no events. Red Stet still works as a clean editor with a Consistency pass and a Markdown-respecting exporter whether the recording is on or off.

Sign in and pick a role rolePreset

On first sign-in Red Stet asks you to pick a role preset. It doesn't gate permissions — every role can read, mark up, and write. It sets your default panel layout. Four presets:

• Editor — the default. Working on someone else's manuscript. Right panel surfaces the Editorial Memo and mark palettes.
• Author — writing your own work. Write mode foregrounded; Style Guide panel ships with you; marks-on-prose de-emphasized.
• Student — submitting to a teacher. Assignments take over the sidebar; Provenance recording foregrounded.
• Teacher — running a class. Different doc entirely; see the teacher dashboard guide.

For self-directed writing, pick Author. Change it later from the profile menu (Reset role inside Customizations).

Creating your first document

In the sidebar foot, click ＋ New document. Red Stet creates an empty doc, opens it, drops you into Write mode. No template picker, no wizard — blank page.

Placeholder title: Untitled — <today's date>. Lives under "My documents". Click the title in the breadcrumb to rename. The slug gets a stable ID; the display title is yours.

There is no paper type, page size, or layout setting at creation. Red Stet writes markdown internally. Paper size is an export decision — you pick it when you export to PDF.

The editor surface

Most of the screen is the writing canvas — centered, capped at a comfortable measure, serif display face by default. No floating toolbar; formatting lives in a collapsible right-edge palette you can ignore if you write Markdown.

The top bar

Three regions. Left: sidebar toggle and breadcrumb (Red Stet / your doc title). Center: the Read / Mark up / Write mode toggle. Right: theme switch, profile chip, TTS bubble.

The right panel

Context-aware. Write mode: writing palette (Bold, Italic, Underline, headings, lists, quote, link). Mark-up mode: proofreader's mark palette. Read mode: disappears. Your role preset also drops the Editorial Memo or Style Guide panel within reach.

The bottom-right widget

In Write mode, an overlay shows word count, save state, and (when recording is on) elapsed active writing time.

Read, Mark up, and Write

The same document looks and behaves three different ways, depending on the mode toggle.

Read

For reading. Marks visible (or hidden, your call in Customizations); prose uneditable; TTS plays; bookmarks work. How you'd hand the doc to someone, or revisit a finished piece.

Mark up

Proofreader's red pen. Select a span, apply a mark — insert, delete, capitalize, awkward, run-on, dozens more — and the mark sits on top of the prose. Useful for second-pass self-edits, or marking up a friend's draft.

Write

Prose editable. Writing palette appears (Bold / Italic / Underline / H1-3 / lists / quote / link). Word counter starts. Markdown shortcuts work — type # at the start of a line for an H1.

Flip modes anytime. Hopping between Write and Read lets you reread without the cursor in your way.

Provenance recording is opt-in

Students get a prompt when they create a new doc — that's the school workflow. Author and Editor mode don't. You opt in, document by document.

The toggle lives in the profile menu: Start Provenance recording. Hit it and a status pill lights up — Provenance: recording — until you stop. While on, Red Stet captures:

• Every keystroke, with timing
• Cursor moves and selections
• Paste actions — the fact of paste and the pasted length, not the source URL or app
• Mode changes, idle intervals, cumulative active writing time

Recording is broken into sessions. Each session ends when you stop or close the tab; the next links back cryptographically. Break the chain, the verifier shows the break.

Local first. The recording lives in your browser until you sign in and sync. Nothing leaves the device unless you say so.

Auto-save, sync, and the cloud question

Red Stet saves continuously. Every keystroke updates local storage. No save button, no save shortcut. The status chip (Saved · 2s ago) is the confirmation.

Local storage by default

Until you sign in, documents, marks, and recordings live in your browser's local storage. Survives a tab close. Does not survive clearing site data, switching browsers, or moving devices. You can stay signed out indefinitely.

Sign-in adds cloud sync

Sign in via the profile chip and docs, marks, and recordings sync to the cloud. Same docs on your phone, laptop, library computer. Sign out and the local copy stays on the machine you signed in from.

The folder option

To treat writing as files on disk, the sidebar's Open folder entry points Red Stet at a directory. Files are read inline; annotated .red.md writes back to the same folder. No sync required.

Multiple documents — naming and finding them

Your sidebar's My documents list is flat, newest first. No folder tree, no nested hierarchy — the flat list plus search replaces it.

Search

The sidebar search matches titles and body. Type two or three words from a sentence you remember and the doc surfaces. Local, fast, works offline.

Renaming

Click the title in the breadcrumb to rename in place. The slug stays stable, so shared links keep working — only the displayed title changes.

Removing

Right-click a doc (or use the kebab) to delete. Local-then-server: gone from this device immediately, removed from cloud sync within seconds. Brief undo in the toast.

Exporting — Markdown, PDF, and .red.md

The Download menu in the sidebar foot is where the doc leaves Red Stet. Three formats:

• Annotated .md — Markdown with marks serialized inline. Re-import to Red Stet and the marks come back. Degrades gracefully for anyone reading Markdown.
• Annotated PDF — typeset for print. Marks render as red marginalia. Hand to anyone who wants paper.
• Annotated .docx — Word. Comments come through as tracked-changes-style margins.

The .red.md format portable recording

If Provenance recording is on, exporting also produces a .red.md — manuscript plus the full session chain, signed, in one file. Hand it to a verifier (redstet.com/verify), an editor, or a publisher; they can replay how the piece was written and confirm the chain hasn't been tampered with.

Full mechanics in Exporting a portable recording. Keep the .red.md around if you might need to prove authorship.

The Consistency layer

Red Stet doesn't ship a grammar checker. It ships a Consistency layer: a per-document Style Guide of decisions you've made (or accepted from a preset) plus a one-shot pass that flags places where those decisions broke.

Open the Style Guide panel from the right edge in Author mode. Load a preset — Chicago, AP, APA, or MLA — and you get a list of decisions: serial comma: yes, em-dash: unspaced, quotes: curly. Edit, remove, or add your own.

Hit Run consistency pass. Red Stet scans your prose and surfaces violations as a queue — accept or dismiss each one. Opinion-aware: decide "no serial comma" and it stops flagging them.

Full mechanics in The Consistency layer.

Where to go from here

→ The Consistency layer — how Style Guide presets, custom rules, and the consistency pass work in practice.

→ Exporting a portable recording — what's in a .red.md, how the verifier reads it, what to tell an editor or publisher who's never seen one.

→ Back to the help library.

Missing something? Email feedback — this doc grows by use.