About

Origin

It started with a simple wish: to frame the Bitcoin whitepaper and hang it in my office. A few one-page versions already existed online, but none matched what I had in mind, so I typeset my own: the full text, the equations and the C code, with every figure redrawn as vector graphics and the genesis block hash in the footer.

The first version was a single poster, briefly published as one-page-satoshi. Once it worked, the obvious question followed: which other texts deserve the same treatment? A list quickly grew, from early cryptocurrency papers to RFCs, manifestos and founding texts of science, and it became clear that the typesetting engine was the real project. The Bitcoin-specific code was split into a reusable engine and per-paper content, and the project became one-page-papers.

Each new poster has pushed the engine a little further. RFC 1925 brought short texts in large type, the Zen of Python centred layouts, RFC 791 full-width diagrams, and John Snow’s cholera map images and hero layouts. Some texts taught the limits of the idea: Turing’s On Computable Numbers runs to 36 pages and cannot fit legibly on a single sheet, so not every classic makes the cut.

On this site

Every poster has its page here, with its PDFs in each format and theme, its full text to read on screen, set from the same source as the poster, and a wallpaper for a phone, a desktop or a 4K screen, which your browser draws from the PDF.

The repository

The engine, the texts and the record of their sources and licenses are on GitHub: github.com/vodhash/one-page-papers. Each poster is built from its text and a meta.yaml file, which gives its source, its edition and its license.

A text is missing? Request a poster, with its source and what you know of its license; the contributing guide gives the checklists that every text goes through.

Coming soon

Texts that wait for a license allowing their redistribution; PENDING.md says what is missing.

• A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (Eric Hughes, 1993)
• Hashcash: A Denial of Service Counter-Measure (Adam Back, 2002)
• b-money (Wei Dai, 1998)
• Bit Gold (Nick Szabo, 2005)
• Bitcoin v0.1 released (Satoshi Nakamoto, 2009)
• Mimblewimble (Tom Elvis Jedusor, 2016)
• Apollo 11: the master ignition routine of Luminary 099 (MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, 1969)
• Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Alan Turing, 1950)
• The Conscience of a Hacker (The Mentor, 1986)
• What would you like to see most in minix? (Linus Torvalds, 1991)
• RPOW: Reusable Proofs of Work (Hal Finney, 2004)
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations General Assembly, 1948)
• The Pioneer plaque (Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, Linda Salzman Sagan, 1972)
• The Arecibo message (Frank Drake and colleagues, 1974)
• I think: the tree sketch of Notebook B (Charles Darwin, 1837)