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How to Adjust Request Settings

Request settings files control the details of the instructions sent to OpenAI, along with the source text. These settings can impact the:

  • English dialect used,
  • handling of text formatting,
  • OpenAI request temperature, and
  • copyediting weight (how light or heavy).

Steps

1) Determine Config File Locations

Determine the file locations of the default configuration and your personal configuration by using the --help option.

copyaid --help

You will see two lines of output similar to the following:

Default config: /tmp/copyaid/package/copyaid.toml
User config: /home/wang/.config/copyaid/copyaid.toml

2) Copy Config Lines

Choose a task you want to use as a starting point. For the purpose of this guide, let's assume the task is named foo. Copy the following three lines from the default config file to the user configuration file. If the user configuration file does not exist, create it.

[tasks.foo]
request = "foobar.toml"
react = ["edit-if-diff"]

Note that the request key refers to a request settings file within the default package config directory.

3) Copy the Request Settings File

This guide illustrates a request settings file named foobar.toml. Copy this file from the default config directory to the directory where your user configuration is located.

4) Modify the New Request Settings File

Edit the new copy of foobar.toml to make your desired adjustments. For example, you might want to change the chat_system value to British instead of American. Or, if you're working with LaTeX files, you might replace Markdown and HTML with LaTeX.

Another setting you may want to adjust is the temperature setting in foobar.toml. For more information, see the explanation of hot copyediting.

Lastly, to reduce the weight of the default heavy request setting, replace Improve with Revise in the system prompt (chat_system).

5) Choose a New Task Name (Optional)

You may want to choose a different task name so that you can still use the default settings of foo. If you want to have a new task name, such as baz, then change the first line of your copied config lines to:

[task.bar]

For more details, see the reference.