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Copyediting tools at Packt

This site is the home of packt-prose and the copyediting skill: tooling that takes the mechanical work out of a copyedit — spelling, grammar, house style, Word styles — so that when a draft reaches a copy editor, their time goes on the edits that actually need an editor.

People first

The goal is not to replace people. Some things about how Packt publishes are not up for automation, and the tooling is built around them rather than against them:

  • Every product a customer receives has been reviewed by a copy editor. The tool prepares a draft for that review; it does not stand in for it. Its output is tracked changes and margin comments — the format of a proposal, not a decision — and an editor keeps the final say on every one.
  • Authors want a real editorial relationship. What authors value is a person with genuine opinions about their writing who helps them constructively. Clearing typos and style mechanics off an editor's desk makes more room for exactly that, not less.
  • Every author and every product sounds different, and should. A chapter's tone is part of what makes it authentic, and the fastest way to ruin a manuscript at scale is to sand every author down to the same voice. The tooling measures an edit's effect on the author's register — contractions, person, rhythm, hedging — against how professional copyedits actually move it, and flags anything that would flatten it.
  • Peer technical review adds value. It stays in the process, for Packt and for the customers reading the result. Where the tooling notices a technical claim it cannot verify, it raises an anchored query for the reviewer or the author — it never quietly "fixes" a fact.

Why we are investing now

Packt's output is changing shape. This year we are scaling three lines at once — Video-to-Book titles, whose first drafts come from automated processes; Nanobooks; and our core book list — and in total we expect to go from under 300 titles in FY26 to more than 600 in FY27, without scaling headcount to match.

Speed matters as much as volume. We want to drastically reduce the time from writing to publication, for two audiences at once. For authors, feedback that arrives in the moment — while a chapter is still warm — keeps them in the writing and lifts the pace of delivery, where feedback that arrives weeks later stalls it. For customers, a relevant title published quickly is worth more than a perfect one published late: our early automation-assisted titles have outsold comparable output, and the evidence points at timeliness — being on shelf when the demand exists — rather than any claim about absolute quality.

Doubling output on the same team only works if the work each draft demands of a person shrinks. That is the whole investment case.

What the tooling actually does

packt-prose runs on an editor's own laptop, never publishes anything, and works on a copy of the file it is given. Around it sits a skill that lets Claude drive the same workflow conversationally, close enough to an author to run a feedback loop in minutes rather than weeks.

The division of labour is deliberate:

  • The tool takes the mechanical layer. Ninety house-style rules, each citing the section of the style guide it comes from; the Word style pass that makes every deliverable look the same; the spelling, spacing, casing and punctuation repairs with exactly one right answer.
  • Safety is deterministic, not judged. Every proposed edit — the tool's, Claude's, or a supplier's — passes gates that refuse anything touching code, identifiers, numbers, links, or text that was not quoted exactly. A refused edit is a line in a report, never a mark in the manuscript.
  • The judgement stays with people. What arrives at a copy editor is a draft whose mechanics are already handled, whose remaining findings are organized by rule with reasons, and whose open questions are anchored comments — so their expertise goes on meaning, structure, and the edits worth a person's attention.

The result we are aiming for, title after title: authors get faster, constructive iterations; editors spend their skill where it counts; customers get more books, sooner, that still sound like the people who wrote them.

Start here

  • Download — the tool for your computer, and the skill on its own.
  • Install — a one-line install, and what to do about the unsigned-binary warnings.
  • User guide — the commands an editor uses day to day, each with its real output.
  • A copyedit, end to end — watch Claude copyedit a real chapter with the tool, every stage and every check shown.