Style Sheet Maintenance Agent

Over a long manuscript, a character becomes Katarina in one chapter and Katerina in another, a place is capitalized differently, and a hyphen comes and goes. Editors keep a style sheet, but it is often built late. This agent reads the manuscript and builds a style sheet from it: names, places, terms, spellings, hyphenation, capitalization, numbers and abbreviations. It finds variants of each entry, lists where each appears, and proposes a ruling based on the house style, a dictionary or the dominant usage. It then checks each chapter against the sheet and lists deviations. When the author or editor makes rulings and edits, it rechecks the full manuscript. It never changes the text. The author approves each ruling. Edge case: a character's dialect spelling is kept if marked as intentional.