xreview: reviewing LaTeX document made easy(er)

Have you ever had to make modifications to a manuscript while needing to keep track of the changes? Have you ever been asked by a journal to provide a revised version highlighting the changes and a clean version? Is your brain utterly incapable of reasoning about a sentence while it's wrapped in dashes and distracting colors? Now you can \usepackage{xreview} to make your life a little less miserable.

To know how you can start using xreview, check the installation section at the end of this document!

The basics

xreview allows you to quickly show and hide changes to a document. This is achieved providing two commands:

• \showchanges to annotate the changes;
• \showclean to compile a clean document.

Changes can be annotated mostly using the commands:

• \removed for removed sections

  

• \added for added sections

  

• \changed for sections that have been modified

  

You can toggle \showchanges and \showclean at any point to only show/hide changes in a certain section!

Maths and equations

Dealing with changing the aspect of maths in latex is always a little painful. xreview tries to deal with most things for you!

Inline math (defined within $ symbols) can be safely used within \removed, \added, and \changed.

To remove equations, xreview provides the remequation and remequation* environments. These typeset equations as if they were \removed and hide them from the clean version.

• remequation* does not number the equation
• remequation introduces a separate numbering scheme for removed equations that one still wishes to reference

This is to that equation numbering will not change between the annotated and clean versions. The prefix for removed equation numbering is normally a capital R. However, this can be customized to one's preference (see Customization). These labels are fully compatible with referencing commands such as \label, \ref, and \eqref.

Similarly, xreview provides the addequation and addequation* for added equations, which are indistinguishible from equation and equation* in the clean version.

xreview also offers tools to deal with removing and adding lines within sets of equations (i.e. the align environment). This can be done via the \removedeqline and \addedeqline commands, which behave like remequation and addequation.

To ensure proper formatting of both the clean and annotated version, please make sure to change on \removedeqline lines alignment tabs (&) to \remaligntab and newline (\\) to remnewline.

The use of \removedeqline and \addedeqline with alignment tabs within the line (i.e. a+b&=c) is somewhat delicate. Please refer to the full documentation in xreview.pdf

Comments

Comments are a great way to communicate with various authors, to carry out a discussion directly on a shared document or to share ideas and questions together with the compiled manuscript.

xreview allows for the possibility to insert comments that out of the box work in one- or two-column documents.

Simple comments can be created with the \comment command. They highlight a snippet of text and are hidden on the clean version.

Every comment is numbered for ease of reference, with a customizable prefix (a capital C by default).

Sometimes comments tend to stick around for a while. However, this has the downside of hiding which have been resolved and which are still outstanding. To avoid this anti-pattern, xreview offers the command \resolvedcomment to mark a comment as resolved!

Changing \comment to \resolvedcomment will make outstanding matters stand out atop a sea of calming satisfying green.

\comment and \resolvedcomment take the same options and have the same syntax, so you can always resolved your comment no matter how it has been customized!

It is most times helpful to know who wrote a comment. This is made easy by the \authoredcomments command.

\authoredcomments[Optional: mods to comment][Optional: mods to resolvedcomment]{Authorname}

This creates two new commands \Authorenamecomment and \resolvedAuthornamecomment which will mark the author and can easily be distinguished.

For best result, consider customizing the comments for each author!

Customization

Most aesthetical aspects of xreview are customizable. To do so, simply insert a similar line in the document preamble

    \renewcommand{\thecommand}{new option}

For example:

\renewcommand{\addedcolor}{green}

will make the added text and equations green!

The commands available to be redefined are:

• \addedcolor [default: blue]: the color of \added sections;
• \removedcolor [default: red]: the color of \removed sections;
• \commentcolor [default: yellow]: the background color of \comment;
• \resolvedcommentcolor [default: green]: the background color of \resolvedcomment;
• \removedeqprefix [default: R]: the prefix for the tag of removed equations;
• \commentprefix [default: C]: the prefix comment captions.

To change the width of the comment box, one can insert in the preamble after \usepackage{xreview}

    \setlength{\marginparwidth}{new width}

The default value is 2 cm, which gives best results on two-column documents

Installation

Installing a latex package is probably a little more cumbersome than it should. Here are the quickest ways to get started with xreview!

To install xreview you are going to need the latest version of xreview.sty. You can download the latest stable version from here.

Installing for a single document

If you plan on using xreview on a single document or in a simple directory, by far the simplest way is to download xreview.sty and copying it into the same directory of your .tex files.

Installing on Overleaf project

If you want to use xreview on Overleaf, simply download xreview.sty and copying upload it in the same place as your .tex files.

xreview.sty must be in the same directory as the .tex file where \usepackage{xreview} is used.

Installing from CTAN for TeX Live

xreview is available on the CTAN package repository. If you are using TeX Live as your LaTeX environment, you can install xreview globally with

$ tlmgr install xreview

Please see the installation guide in case of any errors

Manual Global Instal

If you want to use xreview in multiple documents without needing to keep copy-pasting xreview.sty, you can install it globally for your TeX environment.

This usually is just a matter of copying xreview.sty in the right places (usually ~/texmf/ or /usr/share/texmf/ on Linux or ~/Library/texmf/ on Mac using MacTeX). Please refer to a more detailed guide (i.e. here) if you are having any trouble.

You can check if the global installation has worked in the terminal with

$ kpsewhich xreview

or (if you are using TeX Live)

$ tlmgr info xreview