compact-markup

A rule that is off by default: it reports a bold or italic marker, or a Markdown table, in compact agent text once a decisions table turns it on.

What it catches

A bold or italic marker, or a Markdown table, in compact agent text.

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: bold plus backticks takes a line from 5 tokens to 8, and the same two facts cost 24 tokens as a Markdown table, 13 as a list and 11 as key: value lines. An agent acts on the words, not their emphasis. The measurements are in the machine-text research (research-machine-text.md in the proofread roadmap).

Default decision

The code is PRF7011. 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-markup": "deny"},
  "paths": {"blog/**": {"compact-markup": "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-markup", "code": "PRF7011", "decision": "off", "url": "https://eli.gladman.cc/magus/reference/proofread/compact-markup/"}

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