change-name

# 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: 1. **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. 2. **Original preserved** — bit-for-bit, sha256-pinned, adjacent to the edition. 3. **Total disclosure** — every change enumerated, **visible on page 1** (see [Visible correction notice](#visible-correction-notice-required)), in PDF metadata and attachments, and beside the file (README). Metadata-only disclosure fails: a renamed or printed copy loses the filename, README, and sibling original. 4. **Honest labeling** — the filename says what the file is (`-memorial-edition`, `-corrected`, never a silent replacement). 5. **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): ```bash 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 `(Freudenber)18(g)`, invisible to naive grep. The scanner inflates streams and matches across TJ kern numbers. - **Link annotations** — URIs containing the old name (profile links, repo links) - **Font subsets** — per font: BaseFont, CharSet/FirstChar/LastChar, and **whether the embedded glyphs can spell the replacement**. (Founding case: the email font subset ended at glyph 117 — one code point short of the letter `v`. It could not spell "vanessa". Know this *before* you promise an in-font edit.) Describe findings to the human in plain language: where the name appears, what fonts carry it, what can be edited in-font and what needs a fallback face. ### 2. DISCUSS — agree the plan Present the evidence, then agree, explicitly: - **Which occurrences** change (byline yes; historical citations in *other* people's references may be out of scope), and which stay. - **Replacement strings** — name, email, URLs (beware redirect masking: an old-handle URL that redirects still *displays* the old handle; update visible text). - **Typography** — in-font where the subset allows (recompute kerning), matched fallback face where it doesn't (base-14 Helvetica for sans, Times for serif). - **Labeling** — the edition's filename, the visible page-1 notice (wording and placement), and the embedded provenance note / attachment text. - **The gate** — confirm all five conditions; record the wish/standing evidence in the ledger. ## Visible correction notice (required) Every prestored PDF must carry a **visible correction notice on page 1**. Outside-the-page disclosure (filename, README, sibling original, PDF `/Note` metadata) is necessary but not sufficient — those signals vanish when someone renames, re-hosts, or prints the file. The notice must be **explicit and machine-parseable** — clear enough that a human skimming page 1 and plain text extraction (`pdftotext`, Ghostscript `txtwrite`) both recover: this is not the version of record; what changed; where the unaltered original lives; that a canonical fix is being pursued. **Required content** (condense for page 1; full list may live in a PDF attachment): - Honest label (`CORRECTED MEMORIAL EDITION`, `CORRECTED EDITION`, etc.) and date - **Not the version of record** — cite DOI or publisher identifier when one exists - What was updated (byline, email, footnote URLs, metadata) and the new identity used - Standing / wish — link the subject's own words when they exist - Unaltered original preserved — repository path and **SHA-256** (full hash, or labeled prefix with ellipsis) - Pointer to full change list (embedded attachment or README) - Canonical correction in progress (publisher petition, registry update, etc.) **Placement recommendations** (least disruptive first): | Placement | When to use | |-----------|-------------| | **Footer band above the publisher reference / copyright block** | Default. Page 1 already has small legal text there; the notice reads as metadata, not content. Room for 3–4 lines. | | **Top margin above the title** | When the footer is crowded. One or two lines; keep the full notice in the attachment. | | **Avoid** | Between author block and abstract; inside the abstract; rotated side-margin text — all read as content tampering or archival stickers. | **Typography recommendations:** - **7–7.5 pt** minimum (7 pt floor; do not go to 6 pt) - Match the document's house style — sans used for affiliations, or base-14 Helvetica - Full text-block width (~468 pt on US Letter) — wrap across the whole page, not a narrow column; fewer lines means less vertical stack and no collision with existing header text like "Accepted for DLS" - **Small caps** on the label line (`CORRECTED MEMORIAL EDITION`) - Thin rule (0.25 pt) above the notice to separate it from body content - Monospace or distinct treatment for hashes and URLs aids both reading and extraction **Example** (4-line footer; adapt labels to the case): ``` CORRECTED MEMORIAL EDITION — September 2026. Not the ACM version of record (doi:…). Author name, email (above), footnote URLs, and PDF metadata updated to [New Name] per [standing citation]. Unaltered original: [repo path] (SHA-256 …). Full change list attached; [publisher] name-change correction in progress. ``` ### 3. EDIT — perform the surgery With pikepdf, on a **copy** (never the original): - **Byline/text**: locate the exact TJ array in the page content stream; build the replacement with correct kerning (glyph widths from the font's `/Widths`; word gaps as `-250`-style TJ numbers; known kern pairs, e.g. V–a ≈ +111 in Times); re-center by shifting the text matrix half the width delta; `assert count == 1` for every pattern before replacing — bytes, not regex, wherever possible. - **Annotations**: update `/A//URI` and resize `/Rect` hotspots to the new text width. - **Visible notice**: overlay the agreed correction notice on page 1 (footer band or top margin per recommendations above). Render-check at print resolution. - **Metadata**: `/Author`, XMP `dc:creator`; embed a `/Note` docinfo field stating what changed, when, why, and by whom. - **Attachment**: embed the full enumerated change list as a PDF attachment when the page-1 notice is condensed. ### 4. VERIFY — prove it - **Render** the edited pages (Ghostscript → PNG) and *look at them* — centering, font match, no keming; **the page-1 correction notice is visible and legible**. Zoom against an unedited neighbor for comparison. - **Extract page 1** — the notice text must appear in plain extraction, not only in rendered glyphs. - **Extract** full text (`gs -sDEVICE=txtwrite`) — the old string's count in agreed scope must be **zero**; the new string must appear where planned. - **Regression** — all pages render clean (`-sDEVICE=nullpage`). - **Hash** original and edition; record both. ### 5. PUBLISH — file it honestly Original + edition + README side by side. README enumerates every edit, pins both hashes, cites the wish/standing evidence, and links the canonical-fix path (e.g. [ACM name-change policy](https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/author-name-changes), option 3 — corrected version of record). Commit with a message that tells the story. ## Beyond PDFs — the playbook socket `playbooks/pdf-prestoration.md` is implemented (the founding case, step by step). Planned playbooks each get one file, same shape (when to use, standing required, procedure, verification): `git-mailmap` (attribution correction without history rewrite), `acm-petition`, `orcid`, `registries` (dblp/Scholar/Wikidata), `web-archives` (layer corrections beside immutable snapshots — fixity is evidence, not the enemy), `life-admin` (the chores beyond documents). Add a playbook, advertise it in CARD.yml, and the skill covers a new venue. ## Part of MOOLLM This skill lives in [MOOLLM](../../README.md) — see [skills/README.md](../README.md) for the ecosystem. Founding case study: [designs/prestoration/](../../designs/prestoration/), with the worked example — before and after PDFs, sha256 provenance, and Vanessa's own HN request — in [designs/prestoration/sources/](../../designs/prestoration/sources/). Companion tribute: [Vanessa's philosophy](../../designs/vanessa-freudenberg-philosophy.md). Works standalone: the protocol above and the script in `scripts/` need only python3, ghostscript, and pikepdf.