# Given this TEX file of a book with typos, how might I produce a corrected version. What tools and supporting packages are necessary or useful?

I am not very experienced with the details of processing TEX. I just use it for mathjax, and a few short missives, from time to time.

The book is Space—Time—Matter, by Hermann Weyl, found here in both TEX and pdf http://gutenberg.org/ebooks/43006

I have a copy of the German language original for comparison. The translation has at least 100 typos in the mathematical expressions. I would like to fix them, but I don't know what it would take to process the corrected tex file. I would also like to use a tool such as LyX to make editing easier. But that is not essential.

Any suggestions?

• I just checked and the TeX file compiles without problems on an updated TeXLive2020 installation with pdflatex. (Of course, you need the full archive including the figures.) How can you fix typos? Well, search in the TeX file for some text in the neighborhood of the incorrect equation, and then it should be very easy to make changes even if you do not have a too detailed knowledge of LaTeX. One possible problem could be that the file uses many macros, so you won't be able to post excerpts on Q & A sites if you run into problems that you cannot solve, at least not without further ado.
– user231225
Dec 22, 2020 at 1:09
• To narrow down the source corresponding to a typo, throw in an indexed \marginnote every so often. If the mistake occurs between note 12 and 13... Dec 22, 2020 at 1:18

## 1 Answer

As a start you could copy this project I just made by uploading the files that you linked to to Overleaf

https://www.overleaf.com/read/wdhqnhzfkdws

You can move between source view and the rendered view just by clicking the arrow buttons and re-run tex after editing anything in the left hand pane.

I had to make a couple of small adjustments to the inputenc line in the preamble to use utf8 not latin1 encoding but otherwise the file is unedited.

Here is a view with a source line and corresponding output highlighted

• @user231225 it's a standard linux texlive 2020, and for someone not that familiar with a local tex installation and edit cycle it is not a bad way to start. I do not understand your comment at all, although I have no personal stake in Overleaf and don't really use it myself. Dec 22, 2020 at 2:09
• @user231225 sure the text is important that's why I put the effort in to making sure the tex source ran. I can not imagine why you attach any significance to the top level domain name, whether a site has .com or .org is as much to do with what sites are on offer at your local domain registrar as anything else. Dec 22, 2020 at 2:17
• At a glance, it doesn’t seem to use a lot of macros that would be difficult to read, or to update to another set of fonts, or indeed to LuaLaTeX. The definitions of \msfslant and \boldgreek could be updated in a single line each. Dec 22, 2020 at 3:20
• @Davislor yes the markup is very stylised I think they start from a plain text transcript and just markup up the most obvious things like sections and lists and a bit of math. Also although I uploaded the image directory figures as pdf, the original link in the question has the source of those as eepic figure environments so they could be converted to tikz or whatever. So yes the markup and styling could be tweaked a lot even if the text wasn't changed at all. Dec 22, 2020 at 9:33
• Good LaTeX coding, then. Too bad about the typos in the translation. The one thing that jumps out at me as notably missing is lowercase Greek letters in some of the alphabets. But, if the existing text never uses them, it’s not really necessary to add any, is it? Dec 22, 2020 at 10:09