💁🏻‍♂️ Introduction

🤷🏻‍♂️ Rationale

Most of our business processes at confirm IT are fully automated — infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, reproducible deployments. Nearly everything we do is treated as code: auditable, versioned, and automatable. Document production was the last holdout. We used Apple Pages for a while — more usable than O365, but still impossible to automate in any meaningful way.

The answer was obvious: treat documents the same way we treat everything else. In practice, that meant:

• Web-based and self-hosted

• Version-controlled with full history

• Authentication and authorisation via OpenID Connect

• API for automation and integration

• Real-time collaboration

• Reusable templates and corporate design as packages

No existing tool ticked all the boxes. The first question was which document format to build on. Markdown and reStructuredText lack the typographic control needed for polished deliverables. LaTeX offers that control, but the learning curve makes it impractical for non-technical contributors.

Typst struck the right balance: expressive enough for professional output, approachable enough for the whole team. Typst’s own editor comes close to a complete solution and even offers a self-hosted variant — but while the compiler is open source, the web editor is a closed-source commercial product. We needed something we could fully control: open source, deeply integrated with our identity provider and git workflows, and extensible to our use cases.

So we built TINO: a collaborative, self-hosted editing platform around Typst.

🙅🏻‍♂️ TINO Is Not Office

TINO — pronounced TEE-noh (/ˈtiːnoʊ/) — is short for TINO Is Not Office.

Yes, the first word is TINO again. Expand it all the way and you get «TINO Is Not Office Is Not Office Is Not Office…», a sentence with no natural end — much like the formatting meetings it was built to replace. We’re in proud company: GNU’s Not Unix, WINE Is Not an Emulator, and TINO, with total conviction, Is Not Office – and that’s a feature!

It is, we’ll admit, a bit of an oxymoron. We built a tool whose entire job is producing letters, contracts and immaculate PDFs — the most office-coded work imaginable — and then named it Not Office. No ribbon. No “read-only, locked for editing by another user.” No layout that quietly rearranges itself the moment a colleague opens it on a different laptop. Just versioned, collaborative text that compiles into something you’d actually be happy to send.

So TINO is for the office and, by name, Not Office. Both true.

✨ Features

The TINO editor ships with the following features out of the box:

• Inline SVG preview

  Live-rendered preview next to the editor, updated on every change.
• PDF export

  Compile and download production-ready PDFs directly from the editor.
• Real-time collaboration

  Concurrent editing via CRDT over WebSockets. Changes merge automatically, no conflicts.
• Group-based access control

  Assign viewer, editor, or committer roles per bucket, backed by OpenID Connect group claims.
• Git versioning

  Every bucket is a Git repository with built-in history, commits, and restore.
• Drag & drop uploads

  Drop files or ZIP archives into a bucket to import them. Archives are extracted automatically.
• Local packages

  Reusable templates and shared components as Typst packages.
• Custom fonts

  Mount your own font library for consistent corporate typography.
• Minimal operations

  No database, no object storage. Just a filesystem and your identity provider.
• MCP server (experimental)

  Built-in Model Context Protocol server that lets AI agents list, read, write, compile, and commit Typst files — with the same access rules as a human user.