01 — Sovereign by construction

Word files in. The mandated formats out. Nothing leaves the building.

Germany’s Deutschland-Stack of 18 March 2026 names ODF and PDF/UA at every level of government, ODF by 2027. France’s DINUM directive leaves Windows by autumn 2026. Schleswig-Holstein is most of the way onto LibreOffice. Denmark, Lyon, the Austrian Armed Forces, Amsterdam and Poland are on the same road. SkyeWriter is built for the units on that road who hold decades of .docx.

No cloud, no account, no telemetry, offline licence keys, runs on Linux, and keeps working if the vendor stops. Documents never leave the device, and the software processes no personal data, so there is nothing for it to register or transfer.

Evaluation copies The measurements

02 — ODF in

LibreOffice’s own files read back

SkyeWriter reads .odt files written by LibreOffice Writer, including Writer’s text frames, LibreOffice’s own form of a Word text box, and multi-column pages. A document Writer itself authored, with lists, a table with a repeating header row, a footer page number and a picture, renders 6 of 6 pages identical to Writer’s own PDF, lines within half a point; Writer’s CV and one-page résumé templates 1 of 1 each; its letter template identical but for its live date field. LibreOffice’s own conversion of a Word frames reference reads back at 8 of 12 pages identical to Word.

Measured 2026-09-06 and 07. Limits, stated: a column section that starts mid-page in Writer’s own form is not yet read, and formatting that LibreOffice’s own Word import discards cannot be restored by anyone.

03 — ODF out

A SkyeWriter .odt in LibreOffice: measured, not assumed

A SkyeWriter .odt opens in LibreOffice 26.2 with the same page count, typography, margins, running heads and frames. Pages identical to Word: 291 of 318 on a 318-page book (91 %), 142 of 150, 5 of 5, 4 of 4, 2 of 3. Reopened in SkyeWriter the file is 100 %.

This is not a promise of page identity in LibreOffice. What remains is Writer’s own engine: its word-dependent justification limit, its refusal to break before a slash, its baseline placement on a continued page, and where it sets the first wrapped line beside a frame. We publish the percentage rather than round it up.

Measured 2026-09-06 and 07. Schema validation of the ODF output: not yet.

04 — Mandated formats out

Any .docx or .doc becomes PDF/UA-1, ODT, EPUB or Markdown

One file or a whole folder, on a Linux server with no display, from the command line. The tagged PDF carries headings, lists, tables, figures with the manuscript’s own alternative text, links, text-box content as content and running heads marked as artifacts, and identifies itself as PDF/UA in its metadata. Five tagged exports, including two full books, pass veraPDF 1.30.2’s PDF/UA-1 profile.

Measured 2026-09-06 on a NixOS machine and with veraPDF 1.30.2.

05 — Print-faithful publishing beside LibreOffice

Reports, gazettes and books paginate as Word paginated them, without Word

A corpus of 45 reference documents exports at 2,172 of 2,217 pages positionally identical to Word’s own PDF, every differing page with a recorded cause and none unexplained, contents pages regenerated from SkyeWriter’s own pagination, and the same file paginates identically on Windows and on Linux to a thousandth of a point. The full table is on the specification page.

06 — Licences for institutions

Perpetual per seat. No subscription, ever.

1 seat: $99
3 seats: $252
5 seats: $400
Above 5: By quotation, on a ladder that reaches 40 % off at five thousand seats
Devices: Three computers per person, any mix of Windows, Linux and macOS; phones and tablets on top at no charge
Keys: Signed files, verified offline; no licence server exists
Updates: A year of updates with every licence; longer under Assurance

Purchases under a written agreement are final

The consumer right of withdrawal does not apply to a business or public-sector buyer, and the fourteen-day refund offered at our own checkout does not extend to contracted seats. What replaces it is evaluation before commitment: two or three evaluation copies against a signed declaration, credited in full; thirty days of actual use on every seat before anything is paid; and an acceptance period, stated in the order, tested against criteria you set. If the software fails those criteria and cannot be made to meet them, the contract is unwound and the fees returned.

07 — Assurance, the yearly layer

Twenty percent of the licence value per year, re-purchased each year by agreement

Re-issue of every seat within two business days on proof of loss, at no charge.
A committed first written response within two business days.
All updates within the major version, and new major versions at no charge while Assurance is current.
Conformance updates delivered across major versions when the ODF profile or the PDF/UA requirement changes.
Priority on defects that block a deployment.
A continuity statement.

A minimum yearly amount applies and is set in the agreement; there is no automatic renewal.

Assurance Plus, negotiated

A written response window, an allowance of consultation hours, maintenance of deployment packages (MSI, .deb, Flatpak, MDM profiles), and source escrow with a neutral agent on defined triggers.

08 — Declining Assurance

In writing, with the replacement cost fixed at signing

An institution that declines Assurance does so in writing and accepts a replacement cost fixed in the contract: 75 % of the original contract price within two years of purchase, a new contract after two years. Assurance holders pay nothing at the moment of rescue.

09 — Data protection

Nothing to register, nothing to transfer

Documents never leave the device and SkyeWriter processes no personal data, so there is nothing for the software itself to register or transfer under the GDPR. Value added tax on a self-service purchase is collected and remitted through Payhip; contracted seats are invoiced directly and, for a VAT-registered buyer, under the reverse charge. This website sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads nothing from a third party.

10 — Evaluation

Two or three evaluation copies for an identified institution

Against a signed declaration, with full credit on the volume purchase. Write to hello@skyehawkesoftware.com naming the institution and the unit; the measurements above are reproducible against your own documents on request.

11 — Components

Licensing hygiene

Every component is MIT or Apache-2.0 licensed and the notices ship with the software; nothing GPL, no custom end-user licences in the stack. Checked when each dependency was chosen.

12 — Not offered at any price

So that nobody is surprised later

No onsite attendance, no data recovery, no telephone support, no out-of-hours cover, no response faster than two business days. Rebuilding an environment, custom development, integration and training beyond a contracted allowance are separate quoted work.

Page updated 2026-09-07.