Ten locales are cited. Everything else is uncovered, not unplanned.

The same sentence, ten locales

Nobody agrees about quotation marks.

German lowers the opening quote. Swiss German turns it into guillemets pointing outward. French puts a no-break space inside them (U+00A0) and a narrow one before ! ? ; (U+202F). Finnish and Swedish close with the same glyph they open with. British English swaps the primary and secondary levels round. Every one of these is correct — in exactly one place.

Rendered by the engine from the inputs shown, not typed by hand. Regenerate with npx tsx brand/tools/gen_examples.ts.

Coverage table

Cited, not guessed.

Locale count and citations read directly from spec/locales/; fixture totals from spec/fixtures/. en and de are aliases resolving to en-US and de-DE (spec/rules/locale-resolution.md).

Adding a locale — worked through for Italian

None of this is Italian-specific guidance; nothing below has been checked against an Italian style authority. It is the exact sequence anyone adds any locale through, illustrated with the locale this table is missing.

1. Read spec/schema/locale.schema.json

   It defines what a locale file may say: quote glyphs and inner-space rule, the parenthetical and range dash convention, whether ellipsis abbreviates after terminal punctuation, hyphen-binding word lists, and the no-break-space triggers. Literal strings, literal code points, string lists and enum values only — no regex, no priority numbers, no conditionals. If Italian needs a distinction the schema can't express, that is a spec discussion, not a workaround in the locale file.

2. Write spec/locales/it.json

   One field at a time, each backed by a citation in the mandatory sources array — a national style guide, a standards body (Accademia della Crusca, a major dictionary or publisher's house style), never a blog post or a contributor's own habit. A locale is accepted only as the triple this table enforces: data, fixtures, citation.

3. Add cases to spec/fixtures/it.json

   One { "in", "out", "rule" } pair per behaviour the citation asserts, plus at least one edge case per rule — the ordinary sentence is not the interesting test, the nested quote or nasty numeric range is. Every fixture is automatically also an idempotency case: transform(out) === out is checked for free.

4. Register it in spec/locales/registry.json

   Add "it" to the locales array. Only add an alias (it-CH → it, say) if the fallback is itself a cited decision, not a guess of convenience.

5. Validate and test

   npm run validate:spec checks the file against the schema and NFC-normalizes it; npm run gen && npm test runs the new fixtures through the conformance suite and the fast-check idempotency property. Both must be green — a red run blocks the locale, not just a warning.

6. Open a pull request

   Disagreements about what Italian actually does are settled by citation, not preference — if a review turns up a more normative source, that source wins, not whoever argued longer.

Changing or adding a rule

Rules are cross-locale algorithms, not per-language code. spec/rules/order.json is the single source of truth for a rule's id, pipeline order, default and which locale fields it reads; spec/rules/<id>.md is normative prose written before the implementation — extracting a spec from a finished implementation is exactly the rework this project's spec-first discipline exists to avoid. A behaviour change starts with a fixture in spec/fixtures/, not a diff in src/rules/. Implementation constraints that are already binding, even with one runtime shipped: no regex in a rule (Go's RE2 has no lookbehind — a rule is a single left-to-right scan over code points with explicit lookaround), index by Unicode code point rather than a native string, and rules emit edits for the pipeline to apply rather than mutating text directly, so applyEdits can enforce the contract instead of trusting it.