What we do

We make PasadoDocs, a writing application for people who want a record of how their own work was assembled — kept on their own machine, as they write, without anyone having to be trusted for it.

PasadoDocs is a desktop application for macOS and Windows. It is available at pasadodocs.com, which is a product of Pasado Labs LLC.

The problem it addresses

A writer accused of not having written their own work has, at present, very little with which to answer. The tools built to settle that question examine a finished piece of text and estimate — and their mistakes land on people, who have no way to appeal an estimate.

PasadoDocs approaches it from the other end. Rather than inspecting a finished document and guessing at its origins, it keeps a record while the document is being written. A finished paragraph carries very little information about where it came from. The process that produced it carries a great deal.

What the application does

It records where words came from

Text pasted into a document is marked as such and stays marked as you edit around it. The counts are kept deterministically — no estimation, no model, nothing to disagree with.

It keeps the writing, including what you discarded

The revision history retains branches you abandoned, not only the path you kept. A conventional undo stack throws those away.

It hashes the document in blocks

The work is fingerprinted in sections, so a later comparison can say which part of a document differs rather than only that something does.

The built-in assistant cannot write into your document

This is enforced by the shape of the software rather than by policy: the assistant's replies have no field capable of carrying prose, and an automated check fails the build if one ever appears. You can consult it. It cannot type for you.

What stays on your machine

Your writing does not leave your computer. The application runs locally and stores your documents as ordinary files that you can open, move and back up with anything else.

A small number of one-way fingerprints — cryptographic hashes, from which nothing can be reconstructed — may be recorded so that a document can later be checked against its own record. No prose ever travels with them. The database column that holds a hash cannot hold anything but a hash.

Who it is for

• Writers who want durable evidence of their own process.
• Students and academics who may be asked to account for how a piece of work was produced.
• Editors and publishers who need to understand what a submitted manuscript is composed of.
• Anyone who would rather hold their own record than rely on someone else's assessment of them.

Status

PasadoDocs is in active development and is currently distributed as a beta for macOS and Windows. It ships frequently. Features are described here only once they work; anything still being built is not advertised as though it were finished.