Styleguides

Fill in what matters and leave the rest:

• Fields — short dropdowns for tone, register, audience, address form (Sie/vous vs. du/tu), sentence rhythm, localization, quote marks, number and date format.
• Reference samples — passages of source or target text used as voice references. A target sample (“here’s what good output sounds like”) is the strongest signal of all, especially for fiction and marketing.
• Rules — short do/don’t bullets (“Always use Oxford commas.” “Don’t translate brand names.”).

Begin with a preset (literary modern, marketing punchy, technical precise) and tweak, or paste a passage of your existing translated work and let Literess fill in the fields for you. Each edit creates a new version and activates it, with older versions kept for rollback.

Generation never lands on its own. The editor’s Style guide tab has a Generate & review button, and the Style guides page starts the same run from New → Generate from document…. It drafts a guide from the page you have open or from the whole document, and before it starts you choose where the result should go: a new style guide, or an update to one you already have. Either way the result opens in a review first.

A new guide opens as one editable form. Remove a field, reword a rule, drop a sample, rewrite the notes, then save. An update opens as a diff against the guide’s current version, with what the update adds highlighted and what it would drop struck through, and every change editable, rejectable, or restorable on its own. The footer counts what Apply will actually write, and applying creates a new version of the target. Nothing is overwritten.

The draft arrives with all ten style settings filled, not only the two or three the document happened to evidence, so a setting with nothing behind it comes back at its neutral default and never sits blank. Generation also reads the glossaries switched on for that document, so the draft neither restates a term you have already decided nor contradicts it. Vocabulary shows up as a pattern (the register the words sit in, how foreign words are handled), never as term-level rules, which belong in the glossary.

If you close the review without deciding, the result waits. A Review pending badge sits on the guide’s card in the library and in the editor’s Style guide tab, and the same badge appears at the top of the guide’s own page with a Review button next to it. It survives a reload; it is stored, not held in the browser. That page also carries the library card’s other actions behind a ⋮ button: duplicate, merge, move to a team, and delete.

Words are billed when the generation runs, so a result you discard still costs what the run read. The dialog says so before you start.

A style guide has one shared voice: the tone, register, and rules that hold in every language. On top of that, each target language can carry an overlay for the things that only make sense there, like address form, quotation marks, or number format, plus its own rules and reference samples. An overlay is additive: a field left on Inherit and an empty rule list fall back to the shared voice, so an overlay only carries what actually differs.

When a document is translated the guide is flattened: shared voice with that language’s overlay merged on top. Other languages’ overlays are never mixed in. Generating from a document routes target-specific findings into the right language’s overlay and leaves the others alone, and a generation covering several languages reviews them one at a time. Guides without overlays behave exactly as before.

Merge sits where it does for a glossary: the ⋮ menu on the library card, the same menu on the guide’s own page, and the editor sidebar. Pick the guide to bring in. Only the guide you merge into changes, and the merge costs nothing.

A style guide merge is an AI step. It rewrites the two guides into one coherent guide instead of stacking their rules together: the guide you merge into wins a direct conflict, near-duplicate rules collapse into one, and per-language sections and reference samples from both sides are kept. It shows its reasoning while it works and you can cancel it, the same as generating a guide.

It saves nothing by itself. The merged result opens in the review screen a generated update opens, where you edit it and apply it as a new version, or discard it. Style guides never need languages assigned to merge.

Literess can read the merge screen and change its settings while it is open, and the same goes for a generation screen. The button that starts the work stays yours. See What Literess can do.