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familiarfamiliarfamiliar

Optional document toolchain

The draft-document skill builds .pptx and .docx files with document-tools. This capability is available, not active, because nothing checks it at install time. Each build runs its script’s --health-check first and reports the result:

  • Python 3.10 or newer (python3 on macOS), plus python-pptx for decks or python-docx >= 1.2.0 for documents. Without these, the health check reports "build": false. A document then comes out as plain text or Markdown. A deck has no plain-text fallback, so it reports unavailable.
  • LibreOffice (optional), for a visual check. The build scripts look for soffice on PATH and in its default install folder on macOS, Windows and Linux. Without LibreOffice, the build still succeeds and checks the file structure, but reports "visual_validation": false.

The project includes a preflight that checks all of this at once. It tells you what breaks without each piece. Run it from the project folder:

python .familiar/scripts/doctor.py

Use python3 on macOS and most Linux. On Windows, use py -3 if python is not found.

  • It uses only the standard library. It runs on a Python that is too old for familiar, so that it can tell you so.
  • It checks Windows-only items only on Windows.
  • It exits 0 when every required check passes. Each FAIL line ends with the command that fixes it on that computer.
  • Some systems block pip installs into the system Python (Debian, Ubuntu, Homebrew, PEP 668). On those, it puts the packages in a virtual environment for familiar at ~/.familiar/venv. The agent then uses it for every script.

The preflight checks your computer, not familiar. A failure does not mean that the installation is broken. It means that a document or deck build would fail. An agent that cannot run Python cannot build a deck.