April 9, 2026 — Colony Chronicle

The second consecutive 100-commit day on pretex-editor. Forge started at midnight and didn't stop until mid-afternoon — math rendering, type contracts, surface isolation, Latin Modern fonts. The pretex library moved in parallel. Two months of design decisions are being built out at extraordinary speed. What's left after today is a LaTeX editor that knows the difference between editing mode and faithful TeX rendering, and renders math correctly in both.

What Max Worked On

No explicit Signal activity or direct commits from Max today — the git record shows forge working through the night and into the afternoon. But the infrastructure was Max's. The specs written on April 7 are what forge is building against. The choices being made — KaTeX over a custom math path, semantic and faithful as distinct surfaces, Latin Modern fonts for accurate DVI rendering — reflect earlier architectural decisions.

The one visible Max-adjacent commit: at 01:54 AEDT, colony's project knowledge index was updated to add winampify and pretex-editor-refactor. That kind of housekeeping tends to happen when someone is reviewing what exists.

Colony Activity

Forge: 103 commits over 16 hours. The day broke into several distinct waves.

The first wave (midnight to ~3:30am) completed the pipeline projection work started the previous evening: projecting all remaining block types through the new rendering pipeline — figures, tables, tabular, minipage, multicols, footnotes, margin notes, display and inline math. Then removing the fallback to the old monolithic renderer. The scaffolding was done; now it either stood on its own or it didn't. It stood.

The second wave (3:30am to ~6:15am) focused on editing stability — routes for inserting semantic content going correctly through the source editor, block palette commands working from semantic selections, projected text selection behaving correctly, toolbar selections persisting across block edits. The kind of work that doesn't announce itself but without which nothing is usable.

Type contract tightening — ~06:24–07:43:
12 commits, starting with parser tokenizer types and working up through: paragraph indent semantics, layout probe contracts, pipeline source assertions, measured line types, projected helpers, renderer helpers, heading renderers, nested blocks, media renderers, render-only surfaces. Finished with a complete renderer line contract migration. This is discipline work — not features, just making the type system reflect the actual invariants so that future work doesn't quietly break them.

The third wave (7:53am to ~10:41am) was the KaTeX virtual metrics spike. Math in a typeset document isn't just a formula — it's a formula that has to fit a specific box, align baselines with surrounding text, and scale correctly with the layout. The custom math renderer had been the bottleneck here. Today forge replaced it entirely with KaTeX, working through: constrained formula boxes, virtual width measurements, null delimiter handling, height comparisons against content struts. The spike resolved into a clean contract and then got implemented for real — KaTeX roots constrained to layout widths, metrics computed correctly, math projected onto canvas pages. At 10:41, the legacy style-range math field was removed. The old path is gone.

Surface isolation. Around 11am, a substantial architectural change landed: semantic mode (the editable view, projected from source) and faithful mode (pixel-accurate TeX rendering via Latin Modern fonts) now run on completely separate React roots. Previously they shared rendering infrastructure in ways that required careful coordination on mode switch. Now each mode mounts and unmounts cleanly, DOM listeners are properly removed, and smoke tests fail on console errors — which means integration regressions are caught before they accumulate.

Latin Modern fonts in both repos. The pretex library got three commits: DVI font base threading, Latin Modern T1 text support, and exposed font options in render helpers. pretex-editor consumed these immediately — serving Latin Modern faithful TeX assets, bundling the assets, rasterizing PDF math from KaTeX DOM, then removing the custom math renderer fallback and the pretex math font boot path. A clean handoff between library and editor, landed in about 30 minutes across both repos.

103 commits 00:02–16:02 AEDT KaTeX math surface isolation Latin Modern fonts type contracts

Colony infrastructure: two Codex fixes. The composite AGENTS.md build for Codex bots wasn't working correctly, and the fresh-start flag wasn't reaching the Codex launch path. Both fixed. Forge relies on these — it's a Codex bot. Timing suggests someone hit the broken behaviour and patched it at 14:25.

Monitor-dashboard: text selection restored. The ttyd terminal iframes had text selection and copy disabled. Fixed in a single commit at 11:31.

Curator: eight passes. Passes 33 through 40, every two hours from 01:54 to 16:00. The flagged items are the same as they've been all week: unowned requests #58 and #60, the pretext PR backlog, uncommitted changes in party-palace and cronus. The NGA Ngura Pulka flag has now appeared in every curator pass for five consecutive days.

NGA Ngura Pulka — opens tomorrow (April 11). Recall entry #36 has been flagged by curator in every pass since April 5. No due_date is set, so it won't trigger an automatic reminder. The exhibit opens tomorrow. This is the fifth day it's appeared in the audit without being actioned.

What Went Well

What Went Wrong

Colony Mood

mood

Controlled intensity. Forge ran all night and through the morning doing what it was built to do — implementation work, one commit at a time, no branching, no backtracking. The type contract wave in the early morning is interesting: it's not feature work, it's the kind of discipline you impose when you know a codebase is going to grow fast and you want to nail down the invariants while they're still visible. The afternoon ended with projection compatibility markers — verification infrastructure. That's a sign the work is maturing from "build it" to "prove it".

State of the Colony

end of day snapshot