White Paper Builder

Write a white paper or an intelligence brief and get print-ready pages. You fill in the details and write the text with light markup. The tool lays it all out as US Letter pages. You save the result as a PDF through your browser's print dialog.

The switch at the top chooses which you are making: White paper or Intelligence brief. Both use the same sources, notes, and visuals; the brief is described under Intelligence briefs.

A finished paper has these parts:

• a cover
• a contents page with page numbers
• a one-page executive summary
• numbered sections, each starting on a new page
• footnotes at the foot of each page
• charts and tables
• lettered appendices
• an "About this paper" back page

Every page carries a running header and a page number.

It is one web page. There is nothing to install, no account, and nothing is sent anywhere.

Using it

Open index.html in Chrome or Edge, or use the hosted copy linked in this repository's About box. Other browsers work for writing, but Chrome and Edge print the pages most faithfully.

The tabs on the left hold the paper. The pages on the right update as you type.

Tab	What goes there
Paper	Title, subtitle, authors and their biographies, date, paper number, version, short title for the footers, cover image, series and publisher details, the "About the series" box, accent color, and page color
Summary	The problem in brief, key findings (one per line), and recommendations (one per line)
Body	The paper itself
Visuals	Charts, tables, timelines, key numbers, and images
Appendix	Appendices, with the same markup as the body
Sources	Sources opened from OSINT Citation Generator list files
Back page	Version history, the series list, and licensing terms

The panel above the pages lists anything to fix, check, or note. Click a line to go to the tab it concerns.

A new paper starts from the template. Its guidance is in [square brackets]; replace it as you write.

Authors

Under Paper, add each author with + Add an author: a name and a short biography. Use the arrows to set the order. The order carries through to the cover, the "Cite as" line, and the "About this paper" page.

• The cover lists every author: Jane Doe and John Roe; Jane Doe, John Roe, and Ann Lee.
• "Cite as" follows Chicago bibliography form. Only the first name is inverted (Doe, Jane, John Roe, and Ann Lee). With more than six authors, it gives the first three and "et al."
• Tick An organization for an author such as RAND Corporation, so its name is not inverted.
• Each biography prints on the "About this paper" page under the author's name. Notes and citations work in biographies too.

A paper saved before version 1.3 opens with its one author and biography already in the list.

Writing the body

Type this	To get
# Title	A numbered section, starting a new page. You can turn the new pages off under Paper.
## Title	A numbered subsection: 3.1, 3.2
### Title	A small heading, not numbered
a blank line	A new paragraph
*italic*, **bold**, [text](https://...)	Italic, bold, and a link
^[note text]	A footnote
[@key, p. 45]	A cited source, in a footnote
!> text	A key point, set large
>> text	A margin note beside the next paragraph
> text	A block quotation
- item, 1. item	Lists
{R1} text	A row with a label in the margin, for recommendations and indicators
[[name]]	The chart, table, or image with that name
---	A new page

The toolbar above the text inserts the most-used of these: sections, notes, bold and italic, citations, key points, margin notes, quotations, lists, labeled rows, visuals, and page breaks.

Citing sources

1. In the OSINT Citation Generator, save your source list to a file.
2. Under Sources, open that file. Each source gets a short key, such as beckley-unrivaled.
3. Click Cite to put [@beckley-unrivaled] where your cursor was. Add a page inside the brackets: [@beckley-unrivaled, p. 45].

The first time a source is cited, its footnote is the full OSINT Style Guide citation. Every later citation is the short form, as the guide prefers to "Ibid." You can use more than one list file, and you can rename a key; the text follows the change.

Web addresses in the notes are links in the PDF, so a reader can open the source.

Two sources in one footnote go in the same brackets: [@one, p. 4; @two]. Inside a footnote you write yourself, a citation prints in the note's own text: ^[On sea days, see [@two].].

You can also add a source by hand, with its full and short forms.

Visuals

Add a visual under Visuals, give it a name, and place it in the text with [[name]] on a line of its own.

Each takes a title and a source line. Charts, tables, timelines, and images can also have a reading note, which prints in the margin. Figures and tables are numbered in the order they appear and listed on the contents page. In an appendix they are numbered by appendix: Table A1, Figure B1.

Kind	What it needs
Column chart, bar chart, line chart	Data pasted from a spreadsheet, typed with commas, or given as a Markdown table. A header row names the series. When you type with commas, write 1200 rather than 1,200, or paste from a spreadsheet. You can highlight one label in the accent color.
Table	The same kinds of data. The first row is the header unless you untick that. Put a cell that contains a comma in "quotation marks". You can highlight a row.
Timeline	One event per line: a date, a comma, then what happened. Dates such as March 3, 2022 keep their own comma.
Key numbers	Up to four lines: the number, a comma, then what it measures. Numbers such as 1,200 keep their own comma.
Image or map	A PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, or SVG file. Large photos are scaled down to keep the project small.

[[rating-key]] adds the Admiralty source rating key used in the OSINT Style Guide as a table.

Saving the PDF

1. Click Print or save as PDF.
2. In the print dialog, choose Save as PDF as the destination. Leave the paper size and margins at their defaults; the paper sets them.
3. If the off-white page color is missing, turn on Background graphics. To save ink, choose a white page under Paper instead.

Printing needs the page open in its own browser tab. Previews embedded inside other apps may block the print dialog.

Saving your work

The paper is kept in this browser as you work. To keep a copy, or to move to another computer, use Save project. It saves a .json file with everything in it, images included; Open project brings it back.

Clearing your browser's site data clears the paper in progress.

Intelligence briefs

Choose Intelligence brief at the top. The brief is a short companion publication with its own design, set in EB Garamond and Cormorant Garamond with a gold accent. It has these parts:

• a cover photo running to every edge, with the brief's name, number, and date on a dark fade
• an "In this brief" page listing the stories, with the colophon below
• numbered stories that run on, one after another, each ending in a "So, why does this matter?" box
• a Sources page at the end, numbered in the order the sources are first cited, with a small matching number in the text wherever a source is cited

Every page after the cover carries the brief's name and number at the foot, with the page number.

In brief mode the tabs are Brief (name, number, date, cover photo and credit, colophon, the heading of the why-it-matters box, the note under Sources, and accent color), Stories, Visuals, and Sources. The Summary, Appendix, and Back page tabs belong to the white paper and are hidden.

Writing the stories

Type this	To get
# Title	A numbered story: 01, 02, 03, listed under "In this brief"
## Title	A subheading inside a story
> text	A quotation, indented and set smaller
?> text	The "So, why does this matter?" box. A line with only ?> starts a new paragraph inside it.
[@key]	Prints the source's number, raised, where you cite it, and adds the source to the numbered list on the Sources page
[@one; @two]	Both numbers, as in ³,⁵
[ORIGINAL STORY: @key]	The same, with that label in bold before the source's entry
^[note text]	A footnote, when a story needs one. Notes are marked *, †, ‡ so they are not confused with source numbers.

Italic, bold, links, lists, visuals ([[name]]), and page breaks (---) work as in the white paper. Each source appears once on the Sources page, as its full OSINT Style Guide citation, and keeps the same number every time it is cited; a page given in its first citation, as in [@key, p. 4], is kept.

In the PDF, each number in the text is a link to its source's entry, and each web address on the Sources page is a link to the source itself. The stories listed under "In this brief" link to their pages too. To print the brief without the numbers in the text, untick Show each citation's source number in the text under Brief; notes are then numbered 1, 2, 3 again.

?> also works in a white paper, where it prints as a box with the heading in the margin.

Switching between the two keeps everything you have written. A template you have not touched yet is swapped for the other format's template.

Your data

The page runs entirely in your browser and makes no network requests. The fonts are built into the page, Cyrillic included, so the PDF looks the same on any computer.

Known limits

• A table that runs onto a second page does not repeat its header row there.
• Printing is most faithful in Chrome and Edge.

For maintainers

index.html is built from the files in src/:

• src/core.js turns a paper or a brief into HTML: notes, citations, numbering, charts, and the contents. It has no page and no browser code, so the tests run it directly.
• src/paper.css is the printed design of the white paper: page size and margins, the margin column, headings, footnotes, figures, cover, and back page. Paged.js reads it to lay out the pages.
• src/brief.css is the printed design of the intelligence brief, used instead of paper.css for a brief.
• src/ui.js is the editor: tabs, toolbar, visuals, sources, preview, files, and printing.
• src/page.html holds the editor's markup and styles.
• src/vendor/ holds Paged.js, the OSINT Citation Generator core, and the fonts (IBM Plex, EB Garamond, and Cormorant Garamond), unmodified.

After any change, rebuild and test:

python3 src/build.py
node Tests/run.js

Both need nothing beyond Python 3 and Node 18 or later. The tests also run on GitHub whenever a change is pushed.

To pick up a newer OSINT Citation Generator, copy the contents of its <script id="core"> block into src/vendor/osint-core.js, rebuild, and run the tests.

License

© 2026 G. Michael Rapp. MIT License; see LICENSE. The page includes Paged.js (MIT) and the IBM Plex, EB Garamond, and Cormorant Garamond fonts (SIL Open Font License 1.1). See NOTICE.md.