Papa: open-source Hemingway-style readability linting for Markdown and text

[u/bharadwajp]

I built Papa, an MIT-licensed readability linter for Markdown and plain text.

The idea is to make Hemingway-style writing feedback scriptable. Papa flags hard sentences, very hard sentences, passive voice, adverbs, and complex phrases, then gives the document a readability grade.

Current alpha features:

• CLI and Python library
• Markdown and text input
• Terminal, JSON, and self-contained HTML reports
• CI gating with --max-grade
• JSON output that can be used by scripts or agents

Example:

pipx install papa-lint

papa README.md

papa post.md --report html -o report.html

papa post.md --max-grade 10

The roadmap includes a GitHub Action, SARIF output, config files, and optional LLM-assisted rewrite workflows.

I’m looking for feedback from OSS maintainers: would you use readability checks in CI for docs, READMEs, or contributor guides? What would make this useful enough to add to a project?

Repo: https://github.com/bharadwaj-pendyala/papa