| name | change-name |
| description | Change a name, email address, phone number, handle, or any identifying string across the artifacts where it lives — starting with surgical, provenance-disciplined PDF editing: scan the file, describe what's found, discuss the changes, perform and verify them. Originals preserved, every change disclosed, institutional corrections pursued in parallel.
|
| license | MIT |
| tier | 2 |
| allowed-tools | ["run_terminal_cmd","read_file","write_file"] |
| related | ["postel","robust-first","sister-script","artifactory","skill-snitch"] |
| tags | ["moollm","identity","name-change","pdf","provenance","archives","prestoration"] |
| credits | Founding case: Vanessa Freudenberg's SqueakJS paper (designs/prestoration/). Her words, HN 2021: "The main improvement for me is not being deadnamed." Precedent: Dan Ingalls's Zoo-corrected HOPL paper. Nudge: Don Hopkins.
|
CHANGE-NAME 🦋
Say my name right — everywhere it's written.
People change names — transition, marriage, divorce, faith, stage names, safety,
transliteration across scripts. The record does not follow by itself. Names live in
version-of-record PDFs, citation databases, git histories, link annotations, metadata,
and archives engineered never to change. This skill changes them — carefully, honestly,
and with receipts.
One concrete task ships today: ninja-editing PDF files. The context is a socket:
each venue (git, ACM, ORCID, registries, archives, life admin) plugs in as a playbook in
playbooks/. This SKILL.md is self-contained for the PDF task; playbooks extend it.
The Ethics Gate (read first, always)
A correction is legitimate when all five hold. Any four out of five is a forgery
with good manners:
- Documented wish or clear standing — the subject asked (best: find it in their own
words), or those closest to them act on documented evidence of their identity.
Standing order: self > subject's recorded request > family/co-authors > community.
- Original preserved — bit-for-bit, sha256-pinned, adjacent to the edition.
- Total disclosure — every change enumerated, in the artifact (embedded note) and
beside it (README).
- Honest labeling — the filename says what the file is (
-memorial-edition,
-corrected, never a silent replacement).
- Canonical fix pursued — the edited derivative is a bridge to the institutional
correction (publisher petition, registry update), never a substitute for it.
Never out anyone. A scan that finds every occurrence of an old name is also a map of
someone's exposure. Treat SCAN reports as sensitive; publish only what the subject or
their standing-holders approve.
Protocol: SCAN → DISCUSS → EDIT → VERIFY → PUBLISH
1. SCAN — look at the PDF and describe what you find
Run the sister script (degrades gracefully without pikepdf):
python3 scripts/pdf_name_scan.py TARGET.pdf --find "Old Name" [--replacement "New Name"]
It reports, without changing anything:
- Document metadata —
/Author, /Title, docinfo, XMP
- Content-stream text — including kern-split occurrences: TeX-produced PDFs
store names like , invisible to naive grep. The scanner inflates
streams and matches across TJ kern numbers.
