LaTeX Submission Lint

A manuscript that compiles is not a manuscript that is accepted for review. Before an editor ever opens your paper, an editorial assistant at Elsevier, Springer Nature, IEEE or PLOS runs a checklist against the file you uploaded: is there a data availability statement, a funding statement, a competing-interest declaration, CRediT roles, a line about generative-AI use, an ORCID for the corresponding author, keywords, line numbers for the reviewers. If one of those is absent, the submission is returned to you with a form letter and the clock restarts. None of that is a compilation error, so latexmk and Overleaf both report success.

This extension reads a .tex file and reports the seventeen things that get a paper handed back, each with the line it is on:

Statements the editorial office looks for and cannot find — data availability, funding, competing interest, CRediT author contributions, generative-AI use, ORCID, keywords, continuous line numbering.

Things in the source that break the publisher's build or the review — subfigure, epsfig, psfig, caption2, epsf, t1enc and here; a draft class option; an absolute figure path such as /Users/you/Desktop/figs/setup.eps, which exists on your laptop and nowhere on the publisher's build machine; EPS, PS and BMP figures; \todo{} and % TODO notes left in the text; a manuscript split across \input files when the system wants one flattened source; an acknowledgements section that names your lab in a double-anonymous submission; and a \date{} from a previous year.

What it reports

Run LaTeX Submission Lint: Check this file on an open .tex file. You get a report with one line per finding: the rule, the severity, the line number, and a sentence saying what the publisher does about it. On the sample manuscript shipped in _fixtures/dirty.tex the seventeen rules produce 18 findings, 6 of them at error severity and 9 of them statements that are missing from the manuscript entirely. On _fixtures/clean.tex they produce none.

Free and licensed

Free: the file you have open, all seventeen rules, the full line-numbered report. Nothing is watermarked, time-limited or locked after N runs.

Licensed ($29 once): the same seventeen rules across every .tex file in the project, the include chain of a split manuscript followed from the root file, and one exported submission-readiness report for the whole paper — get the full version. One licence key per person or team seat, 7-day full refund.

Yardstick

Manuscript editing services price per word, from about $0.05, so a 6,000-word paper runs to roughly $300 and a revision cycle takes days.

Web version

The same engine, the same seventeen rules, in one page with nothing to install: https://getreadystack.com/tools/latex-submission-lint

Scope

It reads LaTeX source as text. It does not compile your document, does not contact a server, and does not replace your target journal's own author guidelines — journals differ, and the guidelines page for your journal is the authority. The rules here are the requirements that are common to the large publishers' submission checklists.