How to add todo notes?

Question

Is there a simple way to add todo notes to LaTeX documents ?

I would like to have these notes in red in the generated pdf and a simple syntax to write them.

Answer 1

There is a todonotes package that makes adding notes easy enough. They appear in the margins by default.

A simpler version, if you just want red text in the body of the text as notes is just to define a command \mynotes that makes its argument red.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\newcommand\myworries[1]{\textcolor{red}{#1}}
\begin{document}
Here is some text.
\myworries{But I'm worried about the text}
\end{document}

And then if you want to hide the comments, just add the line \renewcommand\myworries[1]{} below the \newcommand. This will hide all your notes.

A third option is to use LaTeX's own \marginpar command to put a paragraph in the margin. It's not great, but for little notes to yourself it's adequate.

Alan Munn, in the comments, has made me aware of another package todo that seems to be simpler than todonotes but a little more powerful than \marginpar. Though I've not used it so I don't know for sure.

Answer 2

see package cooltooltips. When the cursor is over "This text" the blue window pops up.

The source code for this example:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{cooltooltips}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{color}
\usepackage{hyperref}

\def\cool{\texttt{cool}}
\begin{document}

The \cool\ package enables a document to contain hyperlinks that pop
up a brief tooltip when the mouse moves over them and also open a
small window containing additional text.  \cool\ works only with
pdf\LaTeX\@.  Furthermore, the tooltips that \cool\ produces are much
less cool when viewed under older versions of Acrobat~($<7.0$) or the
current version of xpdf~(3.00) because they don't pop up the extra,
small window.  
\cooltooltip[0 0 1]{Example}{This is an example of a cool tooltip.  
Pretty cool, eh?}{http://www.ctan.org/}{Visit CTAN on the Web}{This text\strut} 
%
is an example of a cool tooltip (assuming
you're viewing this document with a sufficiently capable \textsc{pdf}
reader).  Move your mouse pointer over it and watch what happens.
Then, click on the link.  If your \textsc{pdf} reader is properly
configured it should launch a Web browser and send it to the
\textsc{ctan} home page.

\end{document}

Answer 3

If you want the notes directly in PDF you may want to use PDF annotations with the pdfcomment package.

Take a look at the screenshots

Answer 4

Another possibility is the fixme package. It supports several ways of outputting the notes. You can have them directly inside the text, in the page margin, or as a list at the end of the document. You can even combine the methods.

It comes with support for different authors and different levels of severity. "Notes" and "comments" will simply be ignored if you compile the document with final option, while "errors" will produce compilation errors. In draft mode they will all be printed with different markup. Every author gets his/her own prefix, that is added to the note.

Answer 5

Check out easy-todo on http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/easy-todo