File formats

How lawlint reads plain text, Markdown, and Word documents — and what it preserves when it writes them back.

The CLI and desktop app lint plain text, Markdown, and Word documents.

Passing - — or no file at all — reads stdin.

Markdown

For a .md file, lawlint strips fenced code blocks before linting, so a code sample full of em dashes and delve never produces findings.

Piped input has no filename to infer from, so ask for it:

cat draft.md | lawlint --markdown

Word documents

.docx files are read into the same text model as everything else. With --fix, machine-applicable fixes are written back as native Word tracked changes, each accompanied by a review comment naming the rule — so every change lands in Word’s normal review flow and can be accepted or rejected one at a time.

Everything else in the document is preserved byte for byte: styles, numbering, headers, embedded images, and any tracked changes already in the file.

Stdin

cat memo.txt | lawlint - --format json
lawlint < memo.txt

Reading stdin is what makes lawlint composable in editors and pipelines — see Continuous integration. Since there is no file to write back to, --fix has nothing to modify; use --format prompt or --diff instead.