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Open Verbatim, choose your manuscript, add the folder (or folders) with your sources, and click Check Quotations. You can also drag files and folders onto the window. The first time, Verbatim reads every source, which takes a few seconds for a typical folder; it keeps what it read, so later checks are quick.

To see what it does first, choose Help › Try the Sample: a short essay quoting Mill, Du Bois and Wollstonecraft, with a few planted mistakes.

Manuscript: Word (.docx), Markdown, plain text, RTF, OpenDocument (.odt), .doc or HTML. Footnotes and endnotes are read from Word and Markdown files.

Sources: PDFs, EPUBs, web pages saved as HTML, plain text and Word files, or the attachments in a Zotero library. A folder can hold many works you didn’t cite: Verbatim matches each citation to its file and searches the rest only if a passage isn’t in the cited work.

LaTeX manuscripts aren’t read yet. Export to Word or Markdown first, for example with pandoc.

A passage in quotation marks (double, or single in British-style manuscripts) of four or more words, and any block quotation (a Word “Quote” or “Block Text” style, an indented paragraph, or a Markdown > line). Shorter quoted phrases are usually scare quotes, terms or titles and are skipped; you can change the minimum in Verbatim › Settings.

Check that the quotations are in quotation marks or set as block quotations, and that the manuscript isn’t a PDF (Verbatim reads manuscripts as Word, Markdown or text files). Quotations after a heading such as “References” or “Bibliography” aren’t searched.

Because a quotation should be word for word. Verbatim shows exactly what differs; whether it matters is up to you. If a change is deliberate (for example, modernised spelling), mark the quotation as reviewed with ⌘K and it stays out of the list.

Yes. Text recognition sometimes misreads a letter. When a source was read that way, Verbatim says so next to the result, so you can check the page itself with Show in Source.

It reads the citation next to the quotation and matches it to your files by author and year. It understands author–date citations like (Scott 1998, 87), (Scott 1998: 87–89) and Scott (1998), a page number on its own (the same work as before), footnotes like James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 87., Ibid., and Pandoc keys like [@scott1998, 87].

With the author’s surname and the year, for example Scott 1998 – Seeing Like a State.pdf or Greene & Dalke 2021 – You’re Still an Angry Man.pdf. If a file name doesn’t match its citation, Verbatim still searches the file, and tells you the citation wasn’t matched. With Zotero, file names don’t matter.

Yes. Verbatim never uses the manuscript as a source, and skips files that look like earlier drafts of it (Word, Markdown or text files holding most of its quotations).

Verbatim reads the printed page numbers from the page margins (for example 291 to 354 in a journal article), and uses the file’s own page labels when they’re meaningful. A few PDFs have neither, such as unpaginated web reports; then the page check is skipped and the result says so. If you think a PDF’s pages are read wrongly, please email me the details.

Yes, if the EPUB carries the print edition’s page numbers, as many publishers’ EPUBs do. Otherwise Verbatim shows the chapter instead and notes that the page couldn’t be checked.

Pages without text are read with the Mac’s built-in text recognition. It runs on your Mac, takes a few seconds a page the first time, and the result is kept for next time. You can turn it off in Verbatim › Settings.

Verbatim can read only the files and folders you choose (a Mac App Store rule). A link or alias to a file elsewhere isn’t covered: add the original file, or its folder, instead.

Click Add Zotero Library… and choose your Zotero data folder (usually Zotero in your home folder; it contains zotero.sqlite). Then pick the whole library or a collection; a collection includes its subcollections. Zotero can stay open.

Verbatim reads PDF, EPUB and snapshot attachments stored in Zotero. Attachments that haven’t been downloaded to this Mac, and linked files stored outside the Zotero folder, can’t be read; they’re listed under “files not used” in the results.

Go through To Review with the arrow keys. Space shows the passage in its source; Copy Source Text copies the source’s wording. For a Word manuscript, Export › Word Copy with Comments saves a copy of your document with a comment on each quotation to fix, anchored to the quoted words. Then fix them in Word and choose Check Again (⌘R): Verbatim keeps your place.

No. It only reads it. The Word copy with comments is a new file; your original isn’t touched.

Not against the original, since the words differ. Check them against the translation you quoted from.

It checks every quotation, and shows full results for the first 20 quotations of any manuscript. A one-time in-app purchase unlocks the results for all of them, and the exports. There’s no subscription.

Choose Verbatim › Settings › Restore Purchase, signed in with the same Apple Account.