#Introduction

Pamphlet compiles one Markdown file into one HTML file you can double-click open.

npx @nekoleapuki/pamphlet-cli build plan.md      # gives you plan.html, openable by anyone you send it to

The output contains no <link>, no <script src>, no CDN reference. Diagrams were rendered to static SVG at compile time and inlined, fonts are subset data URIs, images are base64. Offline, over file://, copied around on a USB stick — the behaviour is identical.

#Four promises

The fourth is a constraint on the first three: every interaction must have a form that works without scripting first, and scripting is layered on top.

#When to use it

Good fit: a one-off proposal, a post-mortem, a weekly report, a client explainer — anything you want someone to just double-click, without asking them to install something or standing up a site.

Poor fit:

• A continuously updated multi-page site. One source file = one HTML file; there is no cross-page navigation or site-wide search. The site you are reading is built with Rspress, not with Pamphlet.
• Sending to someone to open on a phone. iOS blocks local HTML files; that is not something Pamphlet can fix. Workarounds in What the output is.
• A several-hundred-page book. One file means the whole thing loads at once.

For how it differs from Pandoc and friends, see Comparisons.

#Why not something that already exists

The field was surveyed: no existing tool does all four at once.

The closest is Quarto — embed-resources: true is already self-contained, .panel-tabset already gives tabs, mermaid-format: svg forces pre-rendered diagrams. It lost not on effort but on direction: Quarto speaks Pandoc Markdown, while Pamphlet's whole promise (a strict CommonMark superset, sources stay .md, they still read fine on GitHub) rests on CommonMark. It also ships a ~100MB binary aimed at the R / Python data science world.

The rest:

#Next

Quick start — ten minutes to your own first output.