Paper Audit

What the buyer receives

A complete pre-submission audit package for a 22-page LaTeX manuscript headed to a journal — five deliverables that leave the science untouched and the presentation spotless:

1. Categorized audit report

audit-report.md — every finding sorted into four clearly separated buckets so the buyer knows exactly what kind of change each one is:

Layout / rendering: three figures rendered past the text margin in the compiled PDF; one two-column figure landing in the middle of a paragraph instead of at the top of the page; an oversized table breaking the page bottom with its last row orphaned onto the next page. Each finding names the page, the figure or table, and the fix.

Typography / punctuation: 14 instances of straight quotes that should be curly in body text; two en-dashes used where em-dashes belong; missing non-breaking spaces before all 31 citations (LaTeX renders ~\cite correctly, the draft used plain spaces); inconsistent serial commas across sections; three occurrences of "et al." typeset without the thin space the journal style requires.

Clarity: five figure captions that describe what the figure shows but not what it means — each rewritten with a one-sentence takeaway added, clearly marked as suggested text the buyer can accept or edit. Two paragraph transitions flagged where a signpost sentence would help the reviewer follow the argument.

Substantive flags (separate, no changes made): two places where the text claims a result the figure does not obviously show, and one equation reference that points to the wrong numbered equation. These are flagged for the buyer to verify — the audit never "fixes" science, it only reports what it found.

2. Before/after renders of fixed figures

figures/before-after/ — for each figure the audit repaired (cropped whitespace, re-exported at journal DPI, fixed font embedding, re-aligned subfigure labels), a side-by-side PNG pair: the figure as it appeared in the submitted PDF versus the corrected version. The buyer sees exactly what changed before touching their source, and every correction is described in plain language next to the images.

3. Equation numbering and cross-reference checks

equations.md — a full pass over the 47 numbered equations: every \label / \ref pair verified, two broken references repaired (they pointed to equations that had been renumbered in an earlier revision), one unnumbered display-math block that was referenced in text promoted to a proper numbered equation, and a check that all in-text references use the journal's required format ("Eq. (3)" vs. "equation 3" standardized throughout). The compiled PDF was re-rendered to confirm no "??" undefined-reference markers remain anywhere in the document.

4. Caption consistency pass

captions.md — all 9 figure captions and 6 table captions normalized to the journal's style: sentence-case vs. title-case made consistent, terminal periods added or removed uniformly, subfigure labeling aligned ((a), (b), (c) ordering verified against the actual panel layout), and every caption checked for a matching in-text citation — one figure was never referenced in the body at all and is flagged with a suggested insertion point.

5. Clean bill of typographic health with minimal source diffs

fixes.diff — the actual source changes, kept as small as possible: whitespace fixes, punctuation swaps, reference repairs, and caption edits, each in a separate commented hunk. The diff is the deliverable the buyer applies, and it touches nothing else — no reformatting of unrelated paragraphs, no package changes, no rewording of claims. Applying it is a git apply away, and a final compiled PDF proves the manuscript still builds cleanly with zero new warnings.

How it was made

The manuscript was compiled from source and inspected in its rendered form — the audit works from what the reviewer will actually see, not just the .tex file. Figures were re-rendered at publication DPI, the full document was rebuilt after fixes, and every change was verified against the rendered PDF rather than assumed from source edits.

What makes this different

Most "proofreading" is spellcheck plus vibes. This is a repeatable, evidence-backed inspection: rendered visual checks, categorized findings, substantive issues kept strictly separate from presentation fixes, and the smallest possible diff. The buyer gets a manuscript that looks like it was prepared by someone who has submitted a hundred papers — because the checks encode exactly that experience.