Create an archive

glyphive create serializes one directory tree, compresses the complete archive stream, encodes it as checked printable lines, paginates those lines, and writes text, PDF, or Word output.

Basic command

glyphive create -f backup.txt -C project .

-C project . means “archive the project directory as the root.” The alpha CLI accepts exactly one root; put multiple inputs beneath a common directory.

The output format is inferred from -f: .pdf selects PDF, .docx selects Word, and .txt or .text selects text. An unknown or missing extension falls back to text, and an explicit --format always wins. Compression selects zstd when the optional dependency is available and otherwise uses gzip. Select behavior explicitly when reproducibility across installations matters:

glyphive create \
  -f backup.txt \
  --format text \
  --codec base16g-crc16-rs \
  --compression gzip \
  --metadata none \
  -C project .

Short command alias: glyphive c.

Output formats

pip install "glyphive[pdf]"
glyphive create -f backup.pdf --font courier --font-size 8 -C project .

pip install "glyphive[docx]"
glyphive create -f backup.docx --font Consolas --font-size 10 -C project .

PDF output accepts the built-in FPDF families courier, helvetica, times, symbol, zapfdingbats, and arial, the bundled ocr-b and dejavu-sans-mono options, or an existing .ttf/.otf path. Word output accepts an installed Word font name (bundled fonts are embedded only in PDF; DOCX references them by name, so a reader without the font installed sees a substitute). dejavu-sans-mono is bundled under the permissive DejaVu Fonts License and is the shipped default PDF font: it was one of only two fonts (with Courier) that held up under the tesseract-glyphive profile in real scan/restore testing and passed its byte-for-byte restore gate, so it is preferred for recovery robustness even though Courier measures denser per page. Pass --font courier for a zero-embedding, higher-density alternative (see the font ledger for the full comparison and the default-font decision). OCR-B is bundled under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. It is not the shipped default, but --font ocr-b --font-size 6 is a measured dense preset: 5,050 usable bytes/page versus Courier 8pt's 4,125, and it measured safe (0% character error, 0% line-insertion) on both Tesseract and PaddleOCR with the project's base16g-crc16-rs alphabet — see benchmarks/results/FONT_CANDIDATES.md for the full matrix. Any other font must still be measured with the intended OCR model before relying on it: a smaller font fits more characters on a page, but it must be validated on the intended printer, scanner, resolution, and OCR engine — nominal density is not the same as recoverable density.

Small fonts are a large density lever

Font size scales chars-per-page by roughly (8/size)**2 (both page dimensions shrink), so a smaller font is a bigger density lever than a wider alphabet. What matters is not the raw OCR character-error rate but whether the whole page still restores byte-for-byte — the per-line CRC + Reed-Solomon correct a surprising amount of small-font OCR noise before decode fails.

End-to-end restore was validated (real create → 300 DPI render → stock Tesseract with the base16g whitelist → extract → byte-diff) on the default base16g codec:

size	density vs 8pt	restores byte-identical (stock OCR)?
8pt	1.0x	✅ yes
5pt	2.6x	✅ yes
4pt	4.0x	✅ yes (clean and Gaussian-blurred)
3pt	~7x	✅ yes (OCR-B; monospace fonts marginal at 3pt)

So --font-size 4 roughly quadruples density and still restores with plain Tesseract — no trained model required (the format's error correction does the work). Caveats: validate on your actual printer/scanner/DPI/engine (nominal density is not recoverable density), and pick OCR-B for the smallest sizes.

Note on trained OCR models: none are needed. Byte-restore-gated evaluation (2026-07-19 through 2026-07-22) settled what a trained model buys over stock Tesseract, and the answer is nothing: - base16g restores byte-for-byte on stock down to 4pt and across row widths. - base32g also restores on stock as of the current format — earlier measurements that showed it needing a model predate the decode hardening, machine-frame Reed-Solomon and final-line padding fixes, which is what moved it from model-required to stock-viable. See its font limits below. - base64/base64g cannot be rescued by a model at all: no conflict-free 64-glyph set exists in printable ASCII (the maximum mutually-distinct set is 55, 52 usable), so their alphabets must double-book OCR-confusable classes. They stay encode-only.

Every model this project trained — on synthetic lines, on framed pages, and on page rasters — either matched stock or lost to it. The published glyphive-ocrmodel-* packages were trained on the wrong data and should not be relied on. Stock tesseract-glyphive is the recommended engine for every codec.

Choosing a denser codec: base32g is Courier-only

base32g-crc16-rs carries 5 bits per character instead of 4, so it is ~25% denser than the default. On stock OCR that density is font-dependent, and the dependency is sharp rather than gradual (measured 2026-07-22, 3 fonts × 5 sizes × 2 widths, byte-restore gated):

font	4pt	5pt	6pt	8pt	10pt
Courier	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
OCR-B	❌	❌	❌	❌	—
DejaVu Sans Mono	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌

(width 60; Courier also restores at width 90 from 5pt up. — is a geometry refusal, not an OCR failure.)

The cause is the alphabet: base32g adds ?@!&+= to the base16g set, and those punctuation glyphs are the ones OCR drops or mangles on OCR-B and DejaVu. A dropped glyph shortens the line, which desynchronizes the frame parse — a failure Reed-Solomon cannot repair, unlike an ordinary misread character.

So: use base32g only with Courier. For any other font, base16g is the correct choice; a smaller font size buys far more density than a wider alphabet anyway (4pt is ~4× denser than 8pt and still restores on stock).

The number of rows per page is calculated from the selected font size and page geometry. Use --minimal-margins to reduce all margins from 36 points to 12 points and use more of the sheet. Confirm that the resulting printable area is inside the limits of the intended printer and scanner before relying on it:

glyphive create -f dense.pdf --format pdf --font-size 8 --minimal-margins -C project .

PDF creation also measures the selected font's widest safe glyph and clamps the payload width to whichever is smaller: what fits between the margins at the requested size/spacing, or 60 characters -- the one width every OCR-safety measurement in this project (including the OCR-B "dense" preset) was actually taken at. A font whose glyphs are narrow enough to geometrically fit more than 60 characters does not automatically get a wider row: the raw per-character OCR error rate climbs as rows get denser (measured, e.g., on OCR-B 6pt's own ~90-char geometric fit), so 60 is the width that is safe across every font and size. A wider row can still restore byte-for-byte once the frame CRC + RS correct that extra noise (see the --force note below), but that margin is font/size-specific, not guaranteed — which is why the conservative width is the default rather than the maximum. Text and Word output retain 60 by default for the same reason, on top of not exposing reliable physical font metrics.

--line-width accepts three spellings:

• auto (the default) — the OCR-measured-safe capacity (≤ 60). Same as omitting the flag.
• max — the largest row that physically fits the font/size/margins. This may exceed 60 and is not OCR-verified; choosing it is the explicit opt-in past the safe cap. On text/Word output (no physical font metrics) max is an error — use auto or an integer.
• an integer ≥ 2 — an explicit column count. An integer above the safe cap needs --force (and must still fit the geometric width); below the cap it is accepted directly. On formats without font metrics no cap is enforced.

A wider-than-60 row (max, or a forced integer) is past the conservative default cap, but it is not automatically unsafe. A byte-restore benchmark (create → 300 DPI raster → OCR → extract → byte-diff) over Courier base16g restored byte-for-byte at row widths 60, 75, and 90 (50% past the cap) at both 8pt and 5pt, clean and lightly blurred — the frame CRC + Reed-Solomon absorb the extra OCR noise a denser row adds. The 60 default stays because it is the width every OCR-safety measurement was taken at and the safe width across all fonts/sizes; wider rows are font- and size-specific and the render-time guard still fails loud if a frame physically overflows the page (at 8pt Courier the geometric fit is ~98 characters, and create refuses anything past it). Decode infers row width from the frames, so no separate restore option is needed.

Create uses disk-backed temporary spools so archive-sized payloads and encoded page lists do not have to remain in memory. Spools use the system temporary directory by default; advanced users can select a same-filesystem location with --temp-dir PATH and tune sequential I/O with --chunk-size BYTES (default: 1 MiB). Temporary files are removed on both success and failure. DOCX generation still retains python-docx's in-memory document model, while text and PDF output are written directly to their destinations.

PDF and DOCX output can center each fixed-width line with --horizontal-alignment center, or distribute its characters across the full printable width with --horizontal-alignment justify. Use --character-spacing POINTS for a smaller, fixed amount of extra tracking. For example:

glyphive create -f spaced.pdf --font ocr-b --font-size 8 \
  --horizontal-alignment center --character-spacing 0.2 -C project .

These controls change physical placement. For PDF, character spacing can also reduce the automatically selected payload width; use --line-width when an experiment requires identical wire rows across layout variants. justify uses different tracking on lines of different lengths, so center plus modest fixed spacing is usually the better starting point for a character-grid OCR workflow. Treat either option as experimental until it has passed the same print/rasterize/OCR benchmark as the chosen font and size.

Text output preserves exact line endings and separates pages with a form-feed character. Do not reflow or word-wrap a transcript.

Compression

Name	Dependency	Notes
none	none	Useful for isolating encoding and OCR behavior
gzip	none	Portable stdlib compression
zstd	glyphive[zstd]	Optional whole-stream compression

The legacy --none, -z/--gzip, and --zstd flags remain aliases. They are mutually exclusive, and a legacy flag that disagrees with --compression causes the command to stop before writing output.

-L/--level forwards a compression level to the selected implementation.

Redundancy and whole-page recovery

Three independent layers protect a printed document, tuned separately:

• In-line parity (--line-parity {0,2,4}, default 2) puts a small Reed-Solomon field on each printed line, covering that line's own index and payload. A line with one or two bad characters is corrected in place — re-rendered and re-checked against its own CRC — so it never spends any of the document-level budget below. This is the cheap insurance that matters for aged or lightly damaged paper: 2 costs about 6.9 % more printed characters, 4 about 12.3 %, and 0 restores the classic three-token frame with no overhead. Measured effect at the default: documents survive roughly a 0.5 % character error rate where they previously failed below 0.1 %.
• Document-wide Reed-Solomon (--parity-ratio FLOAT, default 0.12) heals what the in-line layer could not — a line too damaged to correct becomes a known erasure and is rebuilt from parity carried on other lines. Lower values shrink the page count but leave less correction budget. --simple is a documented low-redundancy preset (0.04) for small, disposable, or easily re-typeable documents.
• Whole-page parity (--parity-pages K, default 0) emits K extra pages of document-level Reed-Solomon parity over the data pages, so the document survives up to K wholly lost pages (physically destroyed, unscannable, or dropped) — not just character noise. Costs K extra printed pages. Data pages plus K must not exceed 65,535 (a create-time error names the cap). Documents of 255 blocks or fewer use Reed-Solomon over GF(2^8); larger ones switch automatically to GF(2^16), which pairs adjacent bytes into 16-bit symbols so the codeword limit rises from 255 to 65,535. The choice is recorded in the protected header, so restore selects the right field without being told, and glyphive inspect reports which one a document uses. Encoding a 1,000-page document with --parity-pages 8 measures ~2.7 s.

glyphive create -f resilient.pdf --parity-pages 2 -C project .

# Maximum in-line correction (widest per-line parity), for paper you expect to age
glyphive create -f archival.pdf --line-parity 4 --parity-pages 2 -C project .

# No per-line parity — smallest page count, relies on the document-wide layer
glyphive create -f compact.pdf --line-parity 0 -C project .

Even with --parity-pages 0, a missing page is no longer an immediate failure: restore lets the per-line Reed-Solomon try to recover it from the surviving pages, and only fails if that budget is exceeded. Dedicated parity pages make that recovery guaranteed up to K lost pages regardless of the per-line budget.

Metadata profiles

• --metadata none is the default. It archives paths, file contents, and explicitly empty directories.
• --metadata basic also records ordinary permission bits and modification time rounded to integer milliseconds.

Metadata restoration is best-effort because filesystems and operating systems do not all expose the same permissions or time resolution.

Header line

Page 1 begins with a compact, human-readable summary:

#!glyphive v1 base16g-crc16-rs,zstd files=25 bytes=211233 pages=61

This line is display-only — restore reads every authoritative value from the CRC-protected H frames, never from this prose (see the wire format). It deliberately omits the SHA-256 and metadata profile, and any line starting with #! is treated as a comment on the read path. Pass --no-header to omit the line entirely for the tightest possible page; the document still restores identically because nothing depends on it:

glyphive create -f tight.txt --no-header -C project .

Ignore behavior

Glyphive reads .gitignore and .ignore only at the archived root. Matching files and directories are excluded, and .git/ is always excluded. Nested ignore files are not currently applied.

Use --no-ignore to archive everything except .git/:

glyphive create -f complete.txt --no-ignore --compression gzip -C project .

Symbolic links, junctions, and special files are rejected rather than followed; the current archive format has no link or device record.

Verify the result

Inspect the protected header and file manifest before printing:

glyphive list -f backup.txt

For important backups, perform a full restore into a new directory and compare it with the source before treating the printout as the only copy.