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✅ Sign the outline off

Status: tutorial, step 2 of Write a book.

Written for the person who decides what the book is. Assumed: an outline that parses (step 1). Not covered here: changing an outline someone already signed; that is its own workflow.

▶ Step 2: sign the outline off

The first of the two human gates. Nothing generates prose from an unsigned outline, and no command can do this for you:

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chitragupta draft spec sign content/drafts/twins --by "Your Name"
chitragupta draft spec status content/drafts/twins

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content/specs/twins/spec.md: Composable Twins
  2 parts, 4 chapters, 4 sections
  signed off at digest 7cfc6678f261.

The first sign also dates your copyright page. If content/specs/twins/copyright.tex still holds the <year> placeholder spec init put there, sign writes the current year over it and says so, once:

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Wrote the year 2026 into content/specs/twins/copyright.tex; change it there by hand from now on.

Every later sign leaves the file alone: a copyright year is the year the book was first published, not the year it was last rebuilt. Which year to print after that is your edit to make (front matter).

sign records a twelve-hex digest of spec.md in a sibling file (why a sibling), so status can tell three states apart:

State Exit Means
signed off at digest x 0 the approved outline is the one on disk
not signed off 1 nobody has approved this outline yet
changed since sign-off 1 approved at one digest, now another

That non-zero exit is not a new gate (what it is).

It records one digest per chapter as well, and status names the chapters that moved. After a reword of ch-cost's brief:

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content/specs/twins/spec.md: Composable Twins
  2 parts, 4 chapters, 4 sections
  changed since sign-off: approved at 7cfc6678f261, now 6246a85473b1.
  chapters changed: ch-cost

Recording per chapter keeps a revision to one chapter from freezing the other fourteen (why).

Next: write and accept the chapters.