build VS vale

For my book Hands on Scala, I did a totaly different approach: parsed markdown into HTML myself, used puppeteer to turn it into PDFs. The build tool made it easy to import libraries like CommonMark-Java or ApachePDFBox to do what I wanted, wire in external tools like Puppeteer, and gave parallelism and incrementality for free. End result was <1s turnaround on editing chapters and <60s turnaround to regenerate the whope book from scratch

The build pipeline is here, if anyone wants to take a look https://github.com/handsonscala/build

A great example of Puppeteer's PDF generation feature: Li Haoyi's Hands On Scala book. See the build pipeline behind it.

Vale is an OSS tool that you can use as a "prose linter" with many of these rules. You can also write your own rules. Together with a spellchecker its a good replacement for proprietary tools like grammarly.

- https://github.com/errata-ai/vale

> Write in US English with US grammar. (Tested in British.yml.)

heh, that was funny but it turns out the file is a list of British words checked using Vale, which I just learned existed: https://github.com/errata-ai/vale#readme (MIT)

Also, another TIL is that the "e" version of gray is British https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/master/doc/.vale... I had previously erroneously assumed they were just one of those quirks of English (which, I guess is still true but it is less random than I thought)

Off the top of my head, Vale and Acrolinx.

I have recently thought of feeding the suggestions from Vale (https://vale.sh/) into an LLM along with your writing. Currently I just simply ask an LLM to take what I wrote and put it into a more "active voice". I then manually edit my writing to make it more "active" if I choose -- I do not just publish LLM generated content unaltered.

Note: I did not ask an LLM for this comment.

vale to spell check and enforce writing style on my articles