Inside the AI-assisted formatting engine in Docs and Slides

Formatting assistance is one of those features that looks simple from the outside — 'make this look better' — and turns out to be a genuinely hard modeling problem once you dig in. Layout, hierarchy, whitespace, and typography all interact, and a good suggestion has to understand intent, not just apply a template.

We built the formatting engine to run the same local model that powers the rest of Apeirogon, rather than shipping a separate cloud-based design service. That constraint pushed us toward smaller, more efficient models fine-tuned specifically for layout and structure rather than general-purpose generation.

The upside of that constraint is consistency: formatting suggestions in Docs and Slides use the same underlying reasoning as everything else in the Studio, and they show up instantly because there's no round-trip to a formatting API.

It's a good example of how our privacy commitment shapes the products themselves, not just the infrastructure behind them.