A few weeks ago, in the calm before the storm of autumn client deadlines, I finalized and open-sourced MelaFreelance—a minimal, local-first time-tracking tool born out of sheer frustration with bloated SaaS apps.
Then reality hit. Client projects piled up, life events took over, and my local AI experiments with S-MoE (Sparse Mixture of Experts) got temporarily put on hold while waiting for more disk storage.
If you are a builder or a freelancer, you know the feeling: you are swamped, your terminal is glowing at 1:00 AM, but the itch to solve persistent friction never stops.
Between client deliveries, I found myself repeatedly running into a classic, infuriating problem that almost every freelancer, developer, and technical writer faces today:
Why are we still copy-pasting Markdown into Microsoft Word or Google Docs just to fix a misaligned logo for 25 minutes?
The Modern Dilemma: Markdown Won, but PDFs Didn’t Get the Memo
We live in the AI era. Almost everything we draft today starts as pure text.
Our LLM prompts output clean Markdown.
Our notes live in Obsidian, VS Code, or plain .md files.
We think in hierarchies: # Headers, - Bullet points, and | Clean | Tables |.
Traditional formats like .docx and .pages are increasingly feeling like bloated relics. Yet, the moment we need to send a formal quotation, a statement of work, an invoice, or an architecture report to a client, we fall into the WYSIWYG trap:
You paste your text into Word or Pages.
The logo shifts 3mm to the left for no reason.
The table gives 60% width to a 4-character column.
The footer with your VAT and IBAN shatters across page 3.
You touch a single sentence on page one, and the entire layout collapses.
As I like to put it: The paper is not the song.
A word processor keeps the room and the music in the same file. Every time you tweak the writing, the walls move.
I wanted a system that separates them completely—and refuses to let them back into the same room.
Introducing Mela Letterhead 🍎
Today, I’m open-sourcing another tool from the Melasistema workshop: Mela Letterhead.
👉 Website: letterhead.melasistema.com
👉 GitHub: github.com/melasistema/mela-letterhead
Mela Letterhead takes a plain Markdown document, wraps it in your bespoke, professional letterhead, and compiles it into a pixel-perfect, publication-grade PDF.
No dragging boxes. No fighting with brittle HTML-to-PDF converters. No layout drift.
How It Works: The Separation of Paper and Prose
The philosophy is straightforward:
Describe your paper once: In a single letterhead.yaml file, you configure your brand: your logo or typographic wordmark, your accent colours, your margins, and your banking/legal footer.
Write pure content: Your quotation.md or report.md contains only text and metadata (Date, Reference, Client). Zero layout code.
Typeset with Pandoc + Typst: Mela Letterhead resolves lengths into points, maps languages, and hands the document to Typst—the modern, ultra-fast typesetting engine that is replacing LaTeX.
The layout is genuinely page-aware:
Page 1: Full header band with your logo, date, and document metadata.
Inner Pages: Clean, minimal running header.
Last Page: Your complete legal and banking footer (IBAN, VAT, contact info).
Three Ways to Make It Yours
Not everyone has a corporate brand book, and you don’t need one:
The Classic Brand: Drop your logo.svg or logo.png into the assets folder. Mela Letterhead handles sizing and placement identically across every document you’ll ever print.
The Typographic Wordmark: Don’t have a logo? Remove it. The tool automatically typesets your name with editorial typography and tracking. Perfect for solo consultants and creators.
The Pre-Printed Sheet: Already have stationery designed by a graphic designer or printer? Tell the tool to use your background artwork and let Typst flow the text precisely inside your margins.
It runs locally with Python 3.9+, requires only one dependency (PyYAML), and operates via three clean commands: init, check, and build.
Building Melasistema in the Open
From MelaFreelance (tracking time without subscription fatigue) to Mela Letterhead (shipping professional documents without WYSIWYG frustration), the goal behind Melasistema is simple:
Build robust, local-first, open-source tools that give freelancers and independent builders their time back.
Even when client work is overwhelming and large AI experiments like S-MoE are waiting on hardware space, releasing these practical utilities keeps the maker spirit alive.
If you write in Markdown and care about how your work looks when it lands on a client’s desk, give Mela Letterhead a spin.
I’d love to hear your thoughts: How are you currently turning your Markdown drafts into client-facing PDFs?