Could the texmacs add review/tracking/comment features like a way of Word?

Review/tracking/comment is very important to cooperate with others. Could texmacs display changes in the line like Word/Lyx? And add comments similar to the WPS software (display the comment in a side page)?

Most teachers could not accept the original latex. A convenient way of reviewing/tracking/commenting will much useful when writing a thesis/manuscript with these teachers.

There is a package to track comments, see

Documents->Style->Add Package->Utilities->Comment

And there is another package here:

which implements some more fancy commenting. YMMV.

A more basic approach is to use the \todo macro. This is what I do usually in my projects, e.g.

Welcome @ccwind!

There is also functionality to display changes. Click Tools->Versioning tools, then a new menu Version will appear, where you can compare versions. There is also some integration with SVN and Git, which should appear in the Version menu if your file is in such a repository. I haven’t used it myself, so I don’t know how well it works.

In 2020 I wasn’t able to make versioning with Git within TeXmacs work, pls. see the Versioning in TeXmacs thread.

It is quite a while that I don’t try that but as far as I recall it classifies the comments by author, which is useful when a few people collaborate.

I don’t know what you have in your mind does not work. I use command line git commit and git add (not via the TeXmacs GUI), but the diff tool in TeXmacs works perfectly.

You may be right that git commit cannot be made to work easily, see this post by @darcy: Versioning in TeXmacs

I have forgotten what I had seen and my post in that thread does not help me, I have to try it again.

A comment should not influence the main content. Could Texmacs add the comment in a side page like WPS office like this:

Meanwhile, to compare the difference, you must load the old version which is not convenient.

Not convenient. You must load the old version to see the difference. Lyx do a better work to display changes in line.

You can add comments that don’t alter the document typesetting. Ctrl-: or Ctrl-; give you the different types.

What do those shortcuts do? In my system Ctrl-: does nothing and Ctrl-; inserts a new item.

I wonder if “grafting” comments on top of margin notes is possible.

Edit: it is possible. First insert a margin note, then insert a comment inside the margin note. I did not verify if this comment does all that comments are expected to do (first I need to get a list of comment expected behaviours). On the other hand, it seems possible to automate this, but perhaps integration with the menu takes a bit of work.

1 Like

Ctrl-: on my Xubuntu (emacs binding) inserts a new folded comment.
By the way, it seems possible to insert a multiline folded comment, whose brackets look different from the one of the inline comment, but if one unfolds the multiline folded comment then TeXmacs signals an error when hitting return after the “now perhaps incorrectly formatted” comment.

1 Like

What do you mean? Can you screenshot an example? I’m not familiar with this functionality of LyX. As for not modifying the typesetting, if I remember correctly you can use the comment package to insert comments which do not take space in the document. We could have better functionalities for comments, indeed, probably also with option to export to PDF. A request I got from a friend is also to give possibility to insert content which do not alter the typesetting (like working comments you would do in a LaTeX file). Some of this can be implemented via margin notes, but I think we should need a mechanism to specify overlay layers for the document, where one can put content in different layers (and maybe outside the margins of the page). These layers can then be treated differently by the UI (showing/hiding, etc…) without modifying the document.

4 Likes