Hullo Dave, and all.
Is there a language free version of Guiguts?
I'm guessing you mean language-free version of Gutcheck, since Guiguts (one of the custom-written eText processors used at Distributed Proofreaders) is essentially language-free (its interface is in English, but it copes with all sorts of odd characters in other languages.)
I am told by the whitewashers that it is *essential* that all text for PG pass guiguts. Because this assumes that the language scanned is American it gives 90% plus false positive errors, on my books, which is totally unsatisfactory for any piece of test software.
This is just my thought, so I expect a WWer will reply shortly and far more authoritatively. But Gutcheck flags are warnings, not necessarily errors. It *is* necessary to *check* all of them, but unnecessary to *fix* all of them. For example, in a "quoted sentence ending in a footnote marker,"[1] ... Gutcheck will grouse about unspaced quotes, whereas obviously this is quite fine. However, in other places in the text, the"spacing of quotes might well have gone astray," and that would be a fixable error. Some warnings, such as for non-ASCII characters, may be rather redundant in a Latin-1 or UTF-8 file. I use Guiguts to check the Character Counts present (to make sure there aren't any unexpected characters) and then turn off this warning for Gutcheck with a clear conscience. As long as the check is done at an appropriate point in processing, **fully**, the Gutcheck warnings are duplicating what you already know about the file. Hope this helps - it's non-official, but informed through many, many cheery hours of Gutchecking :) Cori