Authors: Moisés de Oliveira, Leonardo Leite

After verifying the absence of a common practice for proof reading (text review) on LaTeX texts, which was discussed in this post, we will start a survey about proof reading methods used by LaTeX users. Text review is a process used by students and their advisers to improve a scientific paper or the student thesis. Our concern is that there is no default method for this process in the LaTeX community. Would this be an edication that the existing methods are not good enough?

Our goal is to know how LaTeX users do proof reading. We will analyse our results and try to figure out if there is some ``best method'' or ``best tool''. If we find aspects to be improved in existing tools, we may build a new LaTeX reviewing system. 

Text review works in the following way:

• A writer.
• A reviewer.

Firstly, Riemman writes a text and sends it to Gaus for review. Secondly, Gauss starts to read Riemann's text and finds out some points that should be improved. How to point it out?

Gauss has some options:

• Writing observations on the printed document.

• Writing on the digital file (.odt, .pdf, .doc or .tex).

This scenario is just an example. We know that there are other more complex scenarios, with more authors.

However, first we want to understand how to solve this simpler case, and we'll try a more general method later.

Which is the best proof reading method out there?

The methods we know are within the following categories:

• Reviewing on the printed manuscript. 

• Reviewing on the digital file:

• PDF annotations (using some PDF viewer).

• Text review features from Libre/Open Office or Microsoft Office (odt, .doc and docx files) used with the LaTeX code.

• Usage of LaTeX commentaries, with the % marker (.tex).

• Usage of LaTeX commands for text review. Examples: \verb \ins ,\verb \chg ,\verb \del and \verb \Nome . These are examples, but there are other possible commands.

• Writers use some versioning system, like git or svn. Writer commits a first version of the text. After, revisor changes the text and commits the changes. Finally, first writer checks the changes using the diff command or something like that.