Name acrostic & line revision

Original fictional scene: a welcome card that gave the wrong instruction

Cass had left four instructions beside the club's potting bench. Mira would arrive after the lunch break, and the first letters were supposed to tell her that the card had been made especially for her. Mist the fern tray. Inspect the shaded pots. Return the labels. The last instruction began Keep, because the rare cutting had to remain in the shaded place the club had agreed on.

Cass read the initials aloud: MIRK. Jun, who had cut the card from thick green paper, suggested that it was close enough. Cass shook her head. They had asked Mira how she wanted her name written. Calling the misspelling a charming nickname would turn a welcome into a decision they had made for her.

An A was easy to find. Arrange the rare cutting in full sun filled the last line, and the hidden name suddenly worked. Cass put the card beside the watering can. When Mira arrived, she read the ordinary instructions before noticing the puzzle. She reached toward the cutting, then paused. At the previous visit Cass had carefully shown her why that particular shaded place mattered to the club's plan.

“Which instruction should I trust?” Mira asked. She did not sound angry; she sounded like someone trying to join the work without undoing it. Cass turned the card over and showed her the initials. The explanation made the slip more awkward. Her name was the reason the card had stopped being a reliable invitation.

Mira said she would rather have an ordinary greeting than an impossible assignment. Cass kept the original shade sentence pinned to the bench while they considered another line. Jun proposed Attend to the shade around the rare cutting. They read it as a request before checking its initial: Mira could actually inspect that space without moving the plant. It was not the only possible sentence, but it no longer asked the puzzle to overrule the work.

Cass rewrote the card only after they agreed on the task. Mira then found MIRA in the initials and laughed at the effort, not at a newcomer being given a new name for convenience. She returned the labels to the drawer and added her own name to the afternoon rota, in the spelling she had chosen to give them.

This is an original fictional scene, not a real gardening recommendation or a documented visitor test. The shade requirement is an authored story constraint. The hidden name matters because the club has to welcome a particular person while remaining a group she can trust. A correct initial cannot compensate for ignoring either her identity or the visible instruction.

The extraction rule belongs to the reader's task

This workbench checks ordered lines that you author. It does not generate filler sentences to force a name. You supply the intended target, extraction rule, blank-line policy and optional line alternatives. The result keeps the original extraction beside the selected revision, with each line's contribution and any remaining mismatches.

Order is essential. Rearranging the same four lines changes their extracted sequence even when every letter remains present. That is why this page is separate from the anagram proof tool. An inventory can verify that four letters exist, but cannot establish that the reader meets them in the required order or that a locked instruction survived a proposed edit.

Choose first or last grapheme for a character-based clue. Choose first or last whitespace-delimited token when the whole boundary token is the intended unit. Token extraction here is a declared whitespace operation, not an automatic linguistic analysis of words. A sentence without separating whitespace may provide a single token; the software does not invent boundaries to make the target work.

The join separator is also part of the rule. Empty joins units directly. A space joins them with spaces. Do not assume the target will silently discard punctuation, spaces or extra units. The comparison options are exact text, NFC, or NFC followed by Unicode lowercasing. They do not transliterate, remove accents or infer an unstated puzzle convention.

Work directly in the line editor, then apply the draft

The ordered editor shows stable line IDs, exact text, a text lock and controls for moving a line up or down. Existing IDs remain visible so an alternative still refers to the intended line after a reorder. You can add a blank line or remove an unlocked line. A text lock prevents editing or removing that line in the editor; it is not a position lock.

Editing produces a draft. Press Apply line edits before saving a project or relying on a new extraction. Until then the engine uses the applied source lines, and the editor's notice identifies the unapplied draft. Discard draft reloads the applied source. This distinction prevents a half-written instruction from silently replacing the version you intended to check.

After applying, inspect both result cards. The original card describes the currently applied source. The selected-revision card describes that source after the explicitly selected alternatives, while preserving blocked locked edits. A revised clue export uses that selected result. Applying the source editor does not automatically approve or copy an alternative back into the source wording.

The advanced line data remains available for exact structured editing and project transfer. It supports up to sixty records with unique IDs, one literal line each and boolean text locks. A malformed advanced record is preserved and must be repaired before the editor can overwrite it. If you deliberately remove a line that an alternative still references, repair that reference explicitly instead of expecting the tool to guess another line.

Follow the default mismatch before choosing a repair

The initial instructions begin Mist, Inspect, Return and Keep. Their first graphemes produce MIRK. The target is MIRA under NFC-plus-lowercase comparison, so the final normalized position differs. The alternative safe-four begins Attend, but its line is initially locked. Selecting the alternative therefore does not change Keep into Attend. The result remains partial and records the blocked request.

Unlock the fourth line in the editor and apply that change. Its source text can remain Keep while the selected alternative now supplies Attend in the revision. The original card still reports MIRK; the revision reports MIRA. The separate outputs let you assess exactly what produced the formal success instead of forgetting which words were changed.

Now select the alternative damaging. It also produces the desired A when the line is unlocked. The tool reports the same formal extraction success while preserving the author's note that the instruction contradicts the established shade arrangement. That deliberate example demonstrates a limit: the program checks supported text operations, not whether a sentence respects every fact in your story.

If you reorder the first two source lines and apply, the sequence changes even though their identities and wording remain. Alternatives stay attached to their line IDs. Read the new order as prose as well as a spelling mechanism. An instruction can become confusing because its prerequisite moved below it, even when the final extracted name happens to remain another valid word.

A locked sentence can be the right unresolved result

A lock is useful when a line carries an established fact, a quotation or an approved instruction that should not change casually. It gives the formal puzzle a real creative constraint. If the target cannot be reached without rewriting that line, the tool should expose the conflict rather than award completion for an unapproved replacement.

The current lock protects wording, not location. Moving a locked line is an explicit ordered edit and is permitted. If your story also requires its exact position, maintain that requirement in your production review; this tool has no position-lock field. Do not interpret one kind of protection as a promise to preserve every possible relationship among the lines.

Only one selected alternative may apply to a line. Unknown proposal IDs, duplicate selections and two competing proposals for one line are input conflicts. A known proposal against locked text is a blocked revision recorded beside the surviving original. The distinction matters: malformed references prevent a coherent analysis, while a deliberate lock can be a meaningful result within one.

Author reasons travel with applied alternatives, but they are not approval signatures. A note saying safe does not prove botanical accuracy, cultural suitability, narrative consistency or natural language. For the fictional card, the writer must read what the instruction asks and why that request belongs in the scene. The engine cannot replace that decision with a correct initial.

Blank lines and printed characters need a declared treatment

Blank lines remain in the reader's clue. With skip selected they contribute no extraction unit. With reject selected they remain visible unresolved issues, even if the nonblank units happen to spell the target. The tool does not silently remove a deliberate stanza break from the public text to make a complete-looking result.

For grapheme extraction, the trim option removes outer whitespace before choosing the first or last grapheme. Disable it if that whitespace is genuinely part of your intended operation. Leading spaces can then become the selected unit. Whitespace-delimited token modes naturally ignore empty boundary pieces; they still preserve the exact source line in the trace and clue export.

A grapheme cluster is the boundary unit used by the runtime's text segmenter, which can keep some multi-code-point sequences together. It is not a guarantee about a printed glyph, a syllable or a language learner's idea of one character. Unicode's segmentation reference explains the distinction between text boundaries and reader perception. Different runtime Unicode data can matter for uncommon sequences, so recheck a final production proof in its actual environment.

Mismatch positions refer to the normalized, joined grapheme sequence and start at zero. They are not source-line numbers. A whole-token extraction or inserted join separator can make several target positions correspond to one line or no line. The line trace is the place to inspect each original contribution; the mismatch list is the place to inspect the resulting comparison.

Let another name challenge the card's purpose

If Mira were called Mirk, the original initials would be formally sufficient without changing the shade instruction. That does not mean the writer should rename her. Her name may already carry relationships, a signature or continuity across chapters. Solving a local puzzle by altering an established identity can create more editorial work than choosing another form of welcome.

If the card merely displayed Mira at the top, the club could still welcome her. It would lose the small act of discovery: recognizing that ordinary shared work was arranged with her in mind. That is the creative reason to keep the acrostic. A hidden name that has no effect on the scene can be removed without treating the loss of a clever mechanism as a story failure.

Compare those alternatives before polishing the extracted letters. You can change the target, change an unlocked instruction, use a different extraction rule that the story genuinely teaches, or abandon the device. The workbench does not choose among these as an artistic ranking. Its value is to keep each option's actual text and constraints inspectable.

The same test applies to a poem, a note or a roster. A line must still perform its visible role. If the first-letter requirement forces irrelevant filler, an implausible order or an instruction that contradicts the scene, record that cost. A name spelled perfectly by a document nobody would plausibly write is not a finished naming decision.

Hand off the public lines and retain the private proof

The dedicated reader sheet contains the revised clue lines and your authored public hint. It omits target, line IDs, locks, alternatives and extraction traces. It preserves blank lines. The private proof contains the target, policies, original and revised extractions, applied reasons and blocked edits. Visible-result and project exports can also contain solutions and belong with author materials.

Field separation does not guarantee that an answer is absent from the prose. You could write the target directly into a clue line or the hint. The program does not understand and remove that disclosure. Inspect the actual reader file, including the order and spacing of its lines, before sharing it with anyone who should not see the solution.

The local scope allows sixty lines, one hundred and twenty alternatives and one selected alternative per line. Each line is a single string of up to two thousand UTF-16 units. Large manuscripts should be divided into meaningful clue documents. This page does not scan a novel, preserve a complete publication history or approve all material after a rename.

Keep the source, alternatives and rule with your project. After editing a name or a clue line, rerun the extraction and reread the document as the character who receives it. Completion needs both an inspectable formal result and an authored judgment that the visible document still belongs in the story. This tool provides the first and makes the second decision harder to overlook.

Does a correct extracted name approve the revised instruction?

No. The engine checks supported extraction and text locks. An authored alternative can spell the name while contradicting the story; its reason is a note to review, not semantic approval.

Does locking a line preserve its position?

The current lock protects text from alternatives and ordinary editor replacement. Reordering is explicit and remains possible. Review position-sensitive story requirements separately.

Why does a blank line remain in the reader sheet?

The extraction policy can skip a blank unit without deleting the authored document line. Reject instead keeps it as an unresolved issue. Neither policy silently changes the public document to hide a layout decision.

Will the reader export remove an answer written in the clue?

It omits solution fields, but preserves your authored lines and hint. It cannot recognize an answer embedded in their prose. Inspect the actual reader sheet before sharing.