Seeding & the Empty Document¶

A quill's schema yields two ready-made documents: a seed (a starter document to edit) and the empty document (the type-minimal input every plate must render). Both come from Quill.yaml alone: no one hand-writes them. A model authors through the authoring document instead.

Seeding: the starter document¶

Seeding materializes a real Document: the main card plus one card per composable kind, each carrying its kind's seed and every other field left absent so the render floor fills default:, else the field's blank. Hand it to an editor as a "new document" starter, or render it directly.

Accessors¶

	Seed	Empty	Example
Python	`quill.seed_document()`	`quill.empty_document()`	`quill.example_document()`
JavaScript	`quill.seedDocument()`	`quill.emptyDocument()`	`quill.exampleDocument()`
Rust	`Quill::seed_document()`	`Quill::empty_document()`	`Quill::example_document()`
CLI	`quillmark render <quill>` (no input file)	`quillmark validate <quill>` renders it and the seed	`quillmark validate <quill>`

The empty-document contract¶

A plate MUST render an empty document (just $quill / $kind: main, no fields) without error.

Under blank-filled render every absent field becomes its blank, so the empty document is the type-minimal valid input. A plate that renders it degrades gracefully on every valid shape. Two rules follow:

No template asserts a declared field is non-empty. The schema guarantees presence, not non-emptiness.
A template branching on an enum covers values ∪ blank exhaustively. The blank is valid present input for every enum, so an else fallback renders a variant nobody chose.

Bundled quills are checked against this by fixture tests; quillmark validate <quill> runs the same check over any quill, rendering the empty document and the seeded document through its backend.

Full model: QUILL.md § "The plate contract"; the seeding cascade is in SCHEMAS.md § "Document seeding".