Cookbook QA Skill

Purpose

Automated quality assurance for The Alex Cookbook PDF generation, ensuring consistency in terminology, character representation, and content quality.

Activation Triggers

• •"QA the cookbook"
• •"run QA analysis"
• •"check the PDF"
• •"extract PDF text"
• •"audit cookbook"

Quick Reference

Run QA Analysis

# From project root
.\build\cookbook-qa.ps1

# With specific PDF
.\build\cookbook-qa.ps1 -PdfPath ".\book\output\The-Alex-Cookbook-Digital.pdf"

# Save report
.\build\cookbook-qa.ps1 -OutputReport ".\book\output\qa-report.txt"

Manual Text Extraction

pdftotext -layout ".\book\output\The-Alex-Cookbook-Print.pdf" ".\book\output\pdf-text.txt"

Character Emoji Standards

Important Distinctions

• •🐕 is used for generic "dog-safe treat" tags in the Legend
• •🐩 is specifically for Jolly (she's a poodle!)
• •Jolly is female - use she/her pronouns

Terminology Standards

Difficulty Levels

Standard: Simple | Medium | Complex

IBS Tags

Standard: IBS-Friendly (capitalized)

QA Checks Performed

1. Document Statistics

• •Total lines, characters, words
• •Estimated page count

2. Family Mentions

• •Count of each family member name
• •Ensures all characters are represented

3. Difficulty Terminology

• •Flags "Easy" in recipe headers (should be "Simple")
• •Flags "Hard" in recipe headers (should be "Complex")

4. IBS Terminology

• •Checks capitalization consistency
• •Prefers "IBS-Friendly" over "IBS-friendly"

5. Typo Detection

• •Doubled words (the the, a a, etc.)
• •Common misspellings

6. Pronoun Consistency

• •Jolly (female) shouldn't be "he/him"
• •Freddy (male) shouldn't be "she/her"

7. Chapter Numbering

• •Notes duplicate chapter numbers (front matter vs recipes)
• •This is expected behavior, not an error

8. Emoji Consistency

• •Checks Jolly uses 🐩 not 🐕
• •Verifies ZWJ emojis render as single images (Alex 🧑‍🍳, Claudia 👩‍�)

Build Script Emoji Handling

The build-pdf.ps1 script converts emojis to inline images using emoji-map.json.

Critical Fix (2026-02-03): Emoji replacement must sort keys by length descending to prevent ZWJ sequences from being split:

# CORRECT: Sort by length so compound emojis match first
$sortedEmojis = $EmojiMap.Keys | Sort-Object { $_.Length } -Descending
foreach ($emoji in $sortedEmojis) {
    $Content = $Content.Replace($emoji, $replacement)
}

This prevents 🧑‍🍳 (chef) from becoming two separate images (🧑 + 🍳).

Files to Update When Fixing

When fixing character emojis or pronouns, check these files:

book/00e-readers-guide.md      # Cast of Characters table
github-version/README.md       # GitHub version Cast of Characters

For recipe-specific fixes, check all chapter files:

book/01-appetizers.md
book/02-soups-salads.md
... etc

Common Issues & Fixes

Jolly Wrong Emoji

# Find occurrences
Select-String -Path ".\book\*.md" -Pattern "Jolly.{0,3}🐕|🐕.{0,3}Jolly"

# Fix: Replace 🐕 with 🐩 near Jolly's name

Jolly Wrong Pronoun

# Find occurrences
Select-String -Path ".\book\*.md" -Pattern "Jolly.{0,50}( He | he )"

# Fix: Change "He" to "She"

Easy → Simple

# Find recipes using "Easy"
Select-String -Path ".\book\*.md" -Pattern "Difficulty:.+Easy"

# Fix: Replace "Easy" with "Simple" in Difficulty lines

Integration with Build

The QA script should be run after building the PDF:

# Full build + QA workflow
.\build\build-pdf.ps1
.\build\cookbook-qa.ps1

Dependencies

• •pdftotext: Required for PDF text extraction
  • •Comes with Poppler utilities
  • •Or install via MiKTeX

Output Files

Synapses

• •build-pdf.ps1 → Primary build script
• •cookbook-qa.ps1 → QA automation script
• •00e-readers-guide.md → Character definitions