3.6 Soporte para el desarrollo de documentos

In this final section of the chapter we look at a number of packages supporting document development. The first two packages todonotes and fixme help you with managing notes in the text about stuff that needs doing. They have different approaches, so it is a matter of taste and style which of them fits your own workflow better — you certainly do not need both in a single document. This is followed by the changes package, which is also for note taking, but with the focus on editorial work, providing some specialized support for this. Internally it makes use of todonotes. We also briefly touch upon the pdfcomment package that allows you to produce PDF annotations and tool tips visible in suitable PDF viewers.

A slightly different task is to add markers in a final document to indicate recent changes. Sometimes a note package like todonotes is appropriate for this, but often such changes are simply indicated with vertical lines in the margin, and the package vertbars offers a simple solution for this.

3.6.1 todonotes - Agregar todos a su documento

While writing documentation, it is often the case that one wants to add some reminders about things that still need doing, researching, fixing, or whatever. The package todonotes by Henrik Skov Midtiby offers nice facilities for such tasks, which are easy to use and to adapt to one’s needs.

3.6.2 fixme - Un enfoque ligeramente diferente para todos

While the todonotes package provided a single command that you could customize to your needs, the fixme package by Didier Verna offers four basic commands to indicate different levels of importance.

Besides the different annotation levels, the fixme package offers environments for producing longer annotations and a larger number of layouts and themes for displaying the notes, some of which are shown in the examples.

3.6.3 changes - Un conjunto de comandos editoriales típicos

The changes package by Ekkart Kleinod was written to support editorial work, typically in collaboration with others. It supports the standard copy-editing tasks, well-known from WYSIWYG tools or PDF viewers, except that with a LaTEX document you do this by adding commands in the source. Of course, one can always send around PDF documents for review and let people mark up those using a suitable PDF editor or reader program, but this separates comments from the sources and can be far more complicated when several people are doing reviews independently.

3.6.4 pdfcomment - Uso de anotaciones en PDF y sugerencias sobre herramientas

If you do not mind that your comments and notes are visible only in PDF readers with support for PDF annotations, then it might pay off to take a look at Josef Kleber’s pdfcomment package that provides you with commands for annotating your document in ways you may already be familiar with from using Acrobat or similar software. Such annotations can then be opened and closed when viewing the document in a PDF reader.

3.6.5 vertbars - Agregar barras a los párrafos

A common approach to highlight changes made in a new edition of a document is to add vertical lines in the margin at places where the document has changed. As a simple application of the lineno package Peter Wilson developed the vertbars package that prints vertical bars next to certain paragraphs (instead of line numbers).

It automatically loads the lineno package and accepts all of its options, in particular switch and switch* to control the bar placement. It offers a single environment vertbar, which is similar to lineno’s linenumbers but produces a bar in place of line numbers. The width of this bar is controlled by and defaults to 0.4pt. Any limitation of the lineno package equally applies here, in particular that the bars always apply to full paragraphs.