Letterpress v0.2.0

Vale for prose linting

Rules

Maxim Schepelin

and I are quite strict about the way we write out content. We have a strict set of rules which we enforce upon each other. Here is an example of what we’ve been using for the longest time:

1. Americanization

   1. Capitalisation

   2. Capitalization

2. Capitalization: The first letter of the header is capitalized

   1. Incremental Forgetting

   2. Incremental Forgetting

3. Acronyms: When using an acronym, write out the full terminology and then follow up with the appropriate acronym in brackets. Once you have provided an acronym, continue to use it throughout the piece instead of the full term

   1. service level agreement (SLA)

4. No spaces between dashes: Something—is something

   1. -

   2. —

5. Oxford comma

   1. tea, cookie, and jam

6. Books and movies names are italics in single quotes. 'The beautiful mind'

   1. ‘Origins of species’ by Charles Darwin

   2. As can be seen in the ‘Documentation’ chapter

7. Punctuation in bullet lists when they are complete sentences or completing an introductory stem

8. Just one “Subscribe now” button at the end of the article

9. All articles should have a subtitle

10. Links in blog

    1. if external → footnote

    2. if internal → inline

Why haven’t we thought of this sooner

After having a couple of pieces sent back and forth since one of us forgot to follow the rules properly, we realized that we shouldn’t have to spend time on this and should automate it.

That’s when we discovered Vale. Vale allows us to do linting on prose just as we would lint our code. So we quickly integrated it with letterpress and released v0.2.0 🎉