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, in the artifact (embedded note) and beside it (README).
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):

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 and the embedded provenance note text.
• The gate — confirm all five conditions; record the wish/standing evidence in the ledger.

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.
• Metadata: /Author, XMP dc:creator; embed a /Note docinfo field stating what changed, when, why, and by whom.

4. VERIFY — prove it

• Render the edited pages (Ghostscript → PNG) and look at them — centering, font match, no keming. Zoom against an unedited neighbor for comparison.
• 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, 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 — see skills/README.md for the ecosystem. Founding case study: designs/prestoration/, with the worked example — before and after PDFs, sha256 provenance, and Vanessa's own HN request — in designs/prestoration/sources/. Companion tribute: Vanessa's philosophy. Works standalone: the protocol above and the script in scripts/ need only python3, ghostscript, and pikepdf.