Responding to reviewer’s comments with Ulysses and TaskPaper

There is plenty of serious and humorous advice on how to deal with reviewers’ comments to your manuscripts submitted to peer review journals. This post is about two apps: Ulysses and TaskPaper that make this job less tedious and frustrating for me.

At the first step, I paste all the comments into an Ulysses sheet as a plain text. Then I go through the comments and process them one by one. If I can respond immediately I mark the response with “>” which nicely separates it from the reviewers’ text. If I cannot respond immediately I mark the provisional response with “##TP”.

Ulysses editing window with reviewers comments, drafts responses and the navigation window.

At the same time I add a task to TaskPaper to deal with that specific comment. I may tag it with @xx to indicate who of the co-authors is responsible and even insert the comment itself as a note to the task.

At the second step, I go through the TaskPaper actions and deal with those particularly sticky comments (or delegate these to the co-authors). When the comment has been addressed I cross it out from the TaskPaper, go back to Ulysses, find it through navigation (⌘8), remove the “##TP” mark and write a response in the same way as to other comments.

Fragment of TaskPaper file with actions to respond to reviewers’ comments

Now all that is left to do is to export the responses to pdf from Ulysses and upload it to the journal’s site. Voila!

Final text with responses to reviewers comments generated by Ulysses

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