I am currently letting friends and family spellcheck my thesis written with LaTeX.
Since my markup is macro-heavy and not all of them have ever used another editor but MS Word, I cannot let them work with the source files directly.
What is the best way for them to review the PDF and send me comments, so that I can quickly integrate them back into my .tex files?
Some of them have Adobe Acrobat at work and can send me annotated PDFs, but at least 50% of the time of fixing the changes is searching the exact position of the missing comma or mistake.
Is there a (preferably cross-plattform) solution that would make their and my life easier?
Best Answer
PDFSync is the way to go. Also, compile your thesis with the lineno package for line numbering (you can find it on CTAN with docs).
When anyone annotates your PDF and send it to you, PDFSync will allow you to just click on the passage in the PDF in order to open your LaTeX file in the corresponding position. It will save a lot of time when searching for missing commas and such things. For people that cannot annotate your PDF, they can refer to page and line number (thanks to lineno), and that will also greatly speed up your ability to find the place you need to do corrections, because you can just open your own PDF, and thanks to PDFSync you will be able to open the LaTeX source in the right place.
This is what I do now for my LaTeX writing, and it works wonders when passing review versions around to co-authors. Moreover, line numbers are used by APS when they send proofs for papers about to be published (not sure why they don't do it for referee versions too, but ...), and that makes the communication of typesetting errors much easier.