What is a good package for taking note of draft ideas?

Question

What is a good package for taking note of draft ideas, and have them emphasized in the output document? For example:

This is a very brilliant idea for a 
research topic \somecommandthathighlightsanotetoself{(Try
to find out exactly why this is a brilliant idea.)}

In the output document, I would like to see the note in red or any other color to call out my attention as I review my work. As a bonus, perhaps some note in the margins for additional attention-calling.

Answer 1

You can have a look at the todonotes package. It has some very simple yet quite customizable commands to add notes and stuff to your document. There is also a nice feature called listoftodos that lists all the todo fields that you set in the document.

Compare the MWE below:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{todonotes}

\begin{document}
Some text... \todo{Some Todo stuff} Some more text

\listoftodos
\end{document}

The documentation of the package is quite short but shows some useful examples and tweaks.

But there is also a little drawback: as pointed out in the comments by T. Verron, todonotes is built up on tikz to draw its fancy note bubbles. This means that, depening on the number of notes you have in your document, the compilation process may be significantly slowed down.

Answer 2

If you use Adobe Reader, then there is also pdfcomment. You can run texdoc pdfcomment in your terminal to read the manual. Like todnotes package, this package tries to emulate the commenting functionality found in some word processors.

This sample code is taken from the example.tex file provided with the package and some of the things that it can do.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{amsmath,array}
\usepackage[svgnames]{xcolor}
\usepackage{pdfcomment}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}
\pdfmarkupcomment[author={Donald Duck},subject={Strikeout},color=red,markup=StrikeOut]{A little Test!}{Why is this repeated? This is a StrikeOut markup annotation} 

\pdfmarkupcomment[author={Donald Duck},subject={squiggly},color=Teal,opacity=1.0,markup=Squiggly]{Unfortunately the support of pdf annotations by pdf viewers is only partly available to nonexistent. The reference viewer for the development of this package is \texttt{Adobe Reader}.}{This is a Squiggly markup annotation}

\pdfmarkupcomment[id=300,author={Donald Duck},subject={highlight},color=yellow,opacity=1.0,markup=Highlight]{Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Ut purus elit, vestibulum ut, 
placerat ac, adipiscing vitae, felis. Curabitur dictum gravida mauris. Nam arcu libero, 
nonummy eget, consectetuer id, vulputate a, magna. Donec vehicula augue eu neque. 
}{This is a Highlight markup annotations with page break}

\begin{pdfsidelinecomment}[avatar=CaptainJack,subject={sideline},opacity=1,color=red,icolor=yellow,caption=inline,linebegin={/Butt},lineend={/Square},linewidth=3bp,linesep=1cm]{ ! Delete ! }
\lipsum[2-4]
\end{pdfsidelinecomment}

\vspace{2cm}
\definestyle{mathpopup}{author={},subject={},color=NavajoWhite,markup=Highlight}
\[
\begin{array}{c>{\displaystyle}c}
 \text{Bernoulli Trials} &
 \pdfmarkupcomment[style=mathpopup]{P(E)}{Probability of event E: Get exactly k heads in n coin flips.}%
  =
 \pdfmarkupcomment[style=mathpopup]{\dbinom{n}{k}}{Number of ways to get exactly k heads in n coin flips}%
  {\pdfmarkupcomment[style=mathpopup]{p}{Probability of getting heads in one flip}%
}^{%
    \pdfmarkupcomment[style=mathpopup,mathstyle=\scriptstyle]{k}{Number of heads}
  }%
 \pdfmarkupcomment[style=mathpopup]{(1-p)}{Probability of getting tails in one flip}^{%
 \pdfmarkupcomment[style=mathpopup,mathstyle=\scriptstyle]{n-k}{Number of tails}%
 }%
\end{array}
\]

\end{document}

Answer 3

I don't know if there is a package but I use this command

\def\alert#1{\textcolor{red}{#1}}

and then I simply type

text here \alert{in red} and foo

You can improve it to make use of some \marginpar{}.