compact-costly-abbrev

A rule that is off by default: it reports an abbreviation that costs more tokens than the word it replaces: k8s, w/, b/c, e.g., i.e., or dropped vowels once a decisions table turns it on.

What it catches

An abbreviation that costs more tokens than the word it replaces: k8s, w/, b/c, e.g., i.e., or dropped vowels.

Dimension

economy: words that carry nothing. A finding is counted on the dimension of its rule, the cost it names to the reader.

Why

Measured in tiktoken o200k: "k8s" is 3 tokens and "Kubernetes" 1; "w/", "b/c", "e.g." and "i.e." each cost 1 more than the word; "cnfgrtn" is 4, "mssg" 3 and "cmmt" 2, against 1 each for the whole word. Telegraph English (Arbuzov et al., arXiv 2605.04426) ranks the most abbreviated versions last. An abbreviation earns its place only where it replaces a word of 2 or more tokens. The measurements are in the machine-text research (research-machine-text.md in the proofread roadmap).

Default decision

The code is PRF7012. The decision depends on the kind of text judged:

Changing it

A decisions table sets this rule to deny, advise or off, for everything judged or for the files a glob matches. Proofread reads the table from the file its -decisions flag names:

{
  "rules": {"compact-costly-abbrev": "deny"},
  "paths": {"blog/**": {"compact-costly-abbrev": "off"}}
}

rules applies to every file. A glob in paths applies to the files it matches, and the last match wins. A rule set to off never reports.

Seeing it

A finding names the rule, its code and the decision that applies, and links here:

{"rule": "compact-costly-abbrev", "code": "PRF7012", "decision": "off", "url": "https://eli.gladman.cc/magus/reference/proofread/compact-costly-abbrev/"}

proofread rules prints this entry with every other rule's.

See also

• All proofread rules - every rule, grouped by what it checks
• Writing rules - how the rules apply to this repository's pages and pull requests
• The findings contract - the fields every finding carries