# Zhtw Rules > What the gates cannot tell you about adding or changing a zh-TW rule - why assets/ruleset.json is the only place a vocabulary rule lives, the false-friend problem and the four gates that answer it, the corpus thresholds a rule has to clear, why positions are byte offsets through NFC, and how a rule reaches the scanner, the fixer and the browser build. Use when adding or disabling a rule, when a rule fires on native zh-TW prose, when a fix lands at the wrong offset, or when touching src/engine/scan. - Skill: `sysprog21/zhtw-rules` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add sysprog21/zhtw-rules` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/sysprog21/zhtw-rules/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Coding & Dev Tools - Author: sysprog21 (https://skillmd.com/u/sysprog21) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/sysprog21/zhtw-rules --- # Changing what zhtw-mcp flags `assets/ruleset.json` is the source of truth. `build.rs` serializes it into the binary with postcard, `scripts/check-ruleset.py` owns its dedup, sort and field order, and `src/rules/schema.rs` is the type the two agree on through the generated `scripts/schema-facts.json`. Hand formatting is rewritten and the indent gate fails on it, so the loop is: edit, `python3 scripts/check-ruleset.py --lint`, `make indent`. ## The false friend is the whole problem A `from` term that is also valid zh-TW with a different meaning is the failure mode this project has to defend against, because it turns the linter into something people switch off. 文件 is "file" in zh-CN and "document" in zh-TW. 字體 is a typeface here and a font file there. An ungated rule for either fires on correct prose. Four answers, in order of how much they cost the reader: - `disabled: true` when the term cannot be judged from the sentence at all. - `context_clues` and `negative_context_clues` when a nearby word settles it. - `exceptions` when a fixed phrase is the only safe carve-out. - `editorial_confidence` for the milder case, and `context_suggestions` when the correction itself differs by domain. The two terms above took different answers, which is the point of having four. 文件 to 檔案 is `disabled`, because a sentence holding it reads correctly under either meaning. 字體 to 字型 ships enabled behind `context_clues`, because the typeface sense travels with words the rule can look for. A rule that needs none of these is a rule where the zh-CN form has no zh-TW reading, which is most of the vocabulary list and none of the hard cases. ## The corpus is the argument, not the opinion The assertions in `tests/corpus-evaluation.rs` are what settles whether a rule pays for itself. `make corpus` prints their table, but it does not gate: cargo autodiscovers that target, so `make check` has already run every one of them. There are ten, not the three the printed table draws the eye to: - Aggregate precision at 90% or better. - Two native zh-TW false-positive rates, per fixture and repeat-weighted, each at 5% or less, because each is blind to what the other catches. - Three safe-fix rates: 85% on the AI-generated corpus, which is the figure `CLAUDE.md` records as the contract, and 99% on both the zh-CN conversion and the native corpora. - Four per-corpus floors, added after the other six because recall was printed on every run and asserted nowhere, which let two commits rework AI detection unnoticed: AI-generated recall 94% and precision 91%, zh-CN conversion recall 98% and precision 96%. Per corpus rather than aggregate, because zh-CN carries roughly twice the true positives and would mask an AI detector going quiet. Three more assert each corpus is still big enough to mean anything. A rule that drops a false-positive gate is a rule that fires on `native-zh-tw.json`, which is exactly the prose it is supposed to leave alone. `expected_issues` and `expected_fixed` in a corpus fixture are deliberately independent: the scanner reports confusable and clue-gated rules that the `lexical_safe` fixer will not touch, so an issue without a replacement is correct and not an omission. ## Positions are byte offsets, and not the obvious ones Every offset a rule produces is a byte offset into the original text, mapped back through NFC normalization and, for markdown, through pulldown-cmark event ranges. Computing one on the normalized string alone gives a number that is right for ASCII, right for most CJK, and wrong the moment a composed character or a markdown construct appears before it. `src/engine/normalize.rs` holds the offset map and `src/engine/lineindex.rs` turns an offset into a line and column, in UTF-16 code units by default because that is what LSP clients read. ## One rule, three consumers A rule reaches the CLI, the MCP server and the browser extension. The last one is the one that gets forgotten: the extension builds the library with `browser-wasm` and no `native`, and anything touching `std::fs`, `dirs` or `rayon` has to be behind `#[cfg(feature = "native")]` or that build breaks. `make check` lints the two non-default feature shapes for exactly this reason. The fixer is the second consumer worth naming. A scanner detection is not automatically a fix: `src/fixer.rs` applies only what is safe to apply without reading the sentence, and a rule whose correction depends on context belongs in `context_suggestions` rather than in the safe fixer. ## Where the passes live ```text src/engine/scan/spelling.rs Vocabulary rules out of the ruleset src/engine/scan/case_rule.rs Casing of Latin technical terms src/engine/scan/punctuation.rs Half-width to full-width, context sensitive; emits the quote issues quotes.rs decided on src/engine/scan/quotes.rs Which quotation marks convert at all, the depth-based pairing fix, hierarchy validation src/engine/scan/spacing.rs CJK to Latin and CJK to digit spacing src/engine/scan/ellipsis.rs Non-standard ellipsis to the MoE …… form src/engine/scan/repetition.rs Consecutive duplicates, an ASR and paste tell src/engine/scan/acronym.rs Rejoins a spaced acronym, C P U to CPU src/engine/scan/grammar.rs A-not-A, bare 是, nominalization, prepositions src/engine/scan/rule_ir.rs The matcher spelling.rs drives; the 臺/台 family is variant rules behind variant_normalization src/engine/scan/overlap.rs Resolves detections that cover the same span src/engine/s2t.rs Simplified to traditional, from the OpenCC tables ``` `tests/unit/engine/scan/tests_generated.rs` is misnamed and is not generated: it holds the hand-written scanner tests split out of `scan/mod.rs`. Add a scanner test there or in the pass's own test file under `tests/unit/`, never in the pass itself, and add the corpus fixture separately when the rule is meant to move a metric. zhtw-verify has the `#[path]` declaration a module uses to reach its tests.