About
Why we built Palimpsa.
A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been written on, scraped, and rewritten. The word felt right for what we wanted: a writing surface where the previous draft is honoured but never in the way.
Who it's for
Palimpsa is built for the small set of people who write while citing things — academics, graduate students, journalists, technical authors. Anyone whose first reflex when they hit a tricky paragraph is "I should look up that paper".
We didn't build it for everyone. There are excellent general-purpose word processors. Palimpsa is for the case where your tabs include three PDFs, one BibTeX file, and an unfinished introduction.
How it differs
Three deliberate choices:
- The research panel is built in. We searched arXiv, OpenAlex, and CrossRef so often that we wrote the search into the editor. It is right there.
- Maths first, not bolted on. KaTeX inline and block. Tables that don't fight you. Real LaTeX rendering.
- Offline first. Your local IndexedDB is the canonical copy. The cloud snapshot is a safety net, not a requirement to type.
How we work
Palimpsa is built by BeyondTheBox, a small UK AI company. The same team built Serena. Same calm pace, same plain-language commitments — written down at beyond-the-box.uk/company/commitments.
We don't train AI on your writing. We don't sell data. We don't have a generative assistant — by design. The research panel sends your search query (not your draft) to the open academic databases listed on the research page.
What's next
Long-form authoring features — chapter outline, manuscript view, word-goal tracking — are on the roadmap but deliberately deferred. We'd rather get the core right first.
If you want a heads-up when something ships, the Releases feed is the place. RSS is at /news/rss.xml.
Get in touch
General: hello@palimpsa.com. Press: press@beyond-the-box.uk. Security: security@beyond-the-box.uk — see our disclosure policy.