mdrestyler

Stylometry for writers and AI agents: measure prose against an author voice profile, guard against copying, and restyle a Markdown book toward a voice.

Website · PyPI · Worked example · Changelog

mdrestyler builds a voice profile from DRM-free EPUBs, or from an author's own Markdown book, and then:

• checks a draft against it: the voice distance, narration and dialogue measured apart, and each measure against its range;
• runs a copy guard, so a draft that repeats a scanned book is caught;
• ranks several takes of one unit, and tables a whole book unit by unit;
• comes with an agent skill that runs a need-first restyle: assess every unit, restyle only those that need it, pilot first, choose one whole take by reading, and check that nothing but the voice changed.

The measures locate drift. A reading decides. mdrestyler never picks a take or accepts a change by the number.

It is plain Python 3.10+ with the standard library only. English and Russian have their own word lists; other languages get the language-neutral measures.

Install

From PyPI:

pip install mdrestyler
mdrestyler --help

As an agent skill (Claude Code, Codex and other agents that read SKILL.md), copy skills/mdrestyler/ into your agent's skills folder and run it from there with nothing installed:

python3 skills/mdrestyler/scripts/mdrestyler.py --help

Each release also carries the wheel. mdrestyler verify checks a skill folder against its manifest, and mdrestyler --version prints the version, the source commit and the manifest's digest, which is what products built on mdrestyler pin.

Use

mdrestyler scan --own mine.epub --reference theirs.epub --out profile --work work
mdrestyler check --profile profile chapter-01.md
mdrestyler rank --profile profile take-1.md take-2.md take-3.md
mdrestyler book my-book --profile profile --list units.txt --within p90
mdrestyler install my-book/voice profile --lang en

The skill's SKILL.md and its references explain each step: building and approving a profile, reading the measures, drafting toward a profile, and restyling a book.

In a GitHub workflow

- uses: actions/checkout@v4
- uses: sagol/mdrestyler@v0.1.1
  with:
    command: check
    args: --profile voice chapters/01.md chapters/02.md --strict

The step fails when the copy guard finds a shared run, or with --strict when a measure is outside its range. command takes any mdrestyler command; args is split like a shell would; working-directory sets where it runs.

For AI agents

• SKILL.md is the agent skill: when to use each command and the rules that always hold.
• AGENTS.md is the guide for agents working on this repository or calling the tool.
• check, rank and book print JSON with --json; scan and profile validate print JSON. check exits 0 when measured, 1 on a copy-guard hit (or, with --strict, a measure outside its range) and 2 on an error; rank and book exit 0 once their table is printed. Each command's --help states its own exit codes.
• The website publishes llms.txt, llms-full.txt and agents.json.

Example

examples/cross-restyle restyles a passage of Huckleberry Finn into the voice of The Turn of the Screw and back, with the profiles, every take, the choice and the measures before and after. Each restyled passage moves inside the target voice's range and out of its own.

Building on it

A tool that embeds mdrestyler can configure it once per process with mdrestyler.names.configure(…): the names its messages use, who decides a delegated approval, how its books are laid out, and which earlier profile schemas and defaults it still reads. Pin a release by its manifest digest (mdrestyler --version).

Reference books

A profile keeps measurements and described features of reference books, never their text, and only the author's own books may be quoted in it. The copy guard finds any passage of fifteen words or more that a draft shares with a scanned book. It guards against copying; it is not proof of originality.

License

MIT. See LICENSE. The idea of reading a draft against the author's own held-out text, and of measuring style by mode, comes from AuthorStyle by Fernando Paladini (MIT); the implementation is mdrestyler's own.