Purpose

ShareReadability extends the online LaTeX editor ShareLaTeX with a readability analysis feature. It is possible to get information in real-time on how difficult the current document is to read. It allows to adjust the influence of the selected features and change the used dictionary. Especially due to these settings and real-time analysis it is a useful tool for reviewing documents while writing them.

Usage

After logging in into your sharelatex.com account and choosing a project, the readability analysis becomes available. The settings button opens the following window:



By moving the sliders the influence of each feature can be adapted. All of the sliders will align themselves, so that their weights sum up to 1.0. Additionally, another dictionary than the default one can be selected. The default directory for dictionaries is ‘./data/dictionary’, where ‘.‘ denotes the directory of the executable. The analyze button starts the analysis for the current document and highlights each sentence in the corresponding color of the (weighted) average readability for the five selected features. The detailed results for each feature of a sentence can be seen as annotation when hovering over the sentence. The following image shows the result of a readability analysis:



A flowchart of the Readability Analysis Pipeline can be seen in the following image:

Code & Documentation

The source code can be found in ‘/src’ as well as in the ‘Files’ section on this website. The most important file is ReadabilityAnalysisPipeline.cs, the remaining files are more or less interaction with the GUI, Container and EventHandler. The whitelist (LaTeX commands that are kept) can be found in ‘./data’ and the dictionaries in ‘./data/dictionary’, where ‘.‘ denotes the directory of the executable. The documentation of the code can be found in the remaining sections of this website and the binary in ‘/bin’ .

Reference Paper

Oelke, Daniela, et al. "Visual readability analysis: How to make your writings easier to read." IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 18.5 (2012): 662-674.
Link to the paper