simplify-documents

Document Condensation

Shorten the document without silently changing its meaning. Treat information fidelity and protected passages as hard constraints; treat the length target as a best-effort goal unless the user explicitly raises its priority.

Clarify the Task Brief

1. Confirm the source text, target audience, purpose of use, tone, output format, length target, and protected passages.
2. When the user needs a reusable requirements form, use assets/simplification-brief.md。
3. Make reasonable inferences directly for low-risk missing information; do not block on it. When the user does not specify, follow the source text's language, structure, and approximate audience. If the user asks for condensation but gives no length target, by default try to keep the output at about 60% of the source text.
4. Interpret length requirements consistently:
   • "Compress to 40%" means an output ratio of 0.40；
   • "Reduce by 40%" means an output ratio of 0.60；
   • For an ambiguous "40% compression ratio," treat it as an output ratio of 0.40 , and state this assumption in the verification notes;
   • When a percentage and an explicit word, character, or page limit appear together, prefer the explicit limit.
5. Unless the user explicitly permits rewriting, treat all passages marked as non-deletable as verbatim protected text, preserving their characters, punctuation, order, and internal formatting.

Build a Fidelity Checklist

Before rewriting, take an internal inventory of the source text. Record each item only once, and track its location in the result:

• Facts: names, numbers, units, dates, versions, statuses, scopes, evidence, and causal claims;
• Constraints: requirements, prohibitions, exceptions, preconditions, deadlines, permissions, and strength differences such as "must" and "may";
• Decisions: chosen options, owners, rationale, and open questions;
• Procedures: order, branch conditions, commands, fields, interface labels, expected results, rollback, and safety steps;
• Key examples: keep only examples used to explain unique rules, edge cases, calculation methods, or expected results;
• Protected passages: copy the exact fragments from the source text and mark them for verbatim retention.

Do not show the fidelity checklist unless the user asks. When handling policy, legal, compliance, safety, or highly technical material, before rewriting read references/simplification-rules.md。

Rewrite by Priority

1. First place the protected passages into the draft as-is.
2. Retain every item of fidelity content, keeping conditions and negations adjacent to the claims they constrain.
3. Delete exact duplicates, pleasantries, setup, vague emphasis, self-evident transitions, and meta-narration.
4. Merge sentences only when scope, certainty, actor, time, and constraint strength are fully consistent.
5. Replace wordy phrases with direct expressions suited to the target audience. Explain necessary terms for novices, and retain precise domain vocabulary for experts.
6. Merge parallel content into lists or tables only when the correspondences remain clear.
7. Delete duplicate examples first, then consider deleting unique examples; do not invent substitute facts or examples.
8. Preserve executable order. Steps with different preconditions, actors, commands, verification, or failure handling must not be merged.

If the protected passages or must-keep content already exceed the length target, retain that content and report the conflict. Do not satisfy the ratio by deleting or weakening hard constraints.

Verification results

Run all applicable checks:

1. Fidelity: Against the fidelity checklist, verify numbers, units, dates, names, ranges, causal relationships, certainty, negation, conditions, and exceptions.
2. Operations: Verify step order, preconditions, commands, field names, warnings, and expected results.
3. Protection: Search for each protected passage as an exact substring, verify occurrence counts and original order, and do not rely on visual similarity.
4. Audience: Confirm that vocabulary, background assumptions, and level of detail suit the target readers without changing the substance.
5. Length: Measure according to the metric specified by the user. When only an output ratio is specified without a metric, use non-whitespace character count, with a default tolerance of ±5 percentage points.
6. Readability: Remove newly introduced repetition, and fix dangling references, undefined abbreviations, and ambiguous pronouns.

For plain text or Markdown input, as long as a ratio or protected passage is specified, run the accompanying audit. First locate the directory containing this SKILL.md , then resolve the script path relative to that directory; do not assume the user's current working directory is the Skill directory:

python3 /path/to/simplify-documents/scripts/audit_simplification.py \
  --original source.md \
  --simplified concise.md \
  --target-output-ratio 0.60 \
  --protected-file protected.json

The protected passage file should be a UTF-8 JSON string array. The audit reports the output ratio and reduction ratio, applies the default tolerance, verifies the exact content, occurrence counts, and order of the passages, and returns a non-zero exit code on failure. When ratio or protection checks are not needed, the corresponding optional parameters may be omitted.

Deliverables

Use the condensed document as the primary output. Only when the user specifies a length target, marks protected text, needs assumptions disclosed, or there are constraints that cannot be satisfied, attach a brief verification note that includes:

• The actual length and ratio calculated according to the metric specified by the user;
• Whether all protected passages are preserved verbatim, in the specified counts, and in the original order;
• Any remaining goal conflicts or fidelity risks.

Unless the user requests it, do not add a general summary, changelog, or fidelity checklist, so as not to offset the condensation effect.