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v2.8: Trust System — Documents You Can Seal

· 2 min read
IntentText Team

v2.8 introduces five keywords that turn IntentText documents into trustworthy records: approve, sign, freeze, revision, and track.

The philosophy: you own the format. The CLI gives it trust.

The problem with document trust​

Organizations sign PDFs. They email Word docs back and forth. They track changes with version history buried in a proprietary app. None of this is portable, verifiable, or queryable.

What if trust was part of the document itself?

Five new keywords​

track:​

Enables the trust system for a document:

track: | version: 1.0 | by: Ahmed

This tells the parser to maintain a trust history — a registry of every block and a log of every change.

approve:​

Records an approval with the approver's identity:

approve: Reviewed by legal | by: Sarah Chen | role: Legal Counsel

sign:​

Records a cryptographic signature:

sign: Ahmed Al-Rashid | role: CEO | at: 2026-03-06T14:32:00Z

freeze:​

Seals the document. After this, any content change invalidates the hash:

freeze: | status: locked

revision:​

Records a version change in the trust history:

revision: Updated payment terms | by: Ahmed | at: 2026-03-07

How it works​

When you seal a document with the CLI (intenttext seal contract.it --signer "Ahmed"), the system:

  1. Computes a SHA-256 hash of the document content
  2. Adds a sign: block with the hash
  3. Adds a freeze: block that locks the document

Later, intenttext verify contract.it recomputes the hash and checks it against the seal. If anyone changed a single character, the verification fails.

The trust data lives in the same .it file — below a history: boundary. It's human-readable. It's version-controlled. It travels with the document.

The organizational use case​

An HR department with 200 employment contracts:

intenttext query ./contracts --type approve --format table
intenttext query ./contracts --type sign --format table
intenttext verify ./contracts --recursive

Three commands. You know who approved what, who signed what, and whether any document has been tampered with. No PDF viewer required. No proprietary tool.

Read the trust documentation →