format-validator

An internal manuscript checker that verifies whether a research paper builds correctly and follows the required publication format.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to check LaTeX or RMarkdown manuscripts, references, and venue-specific formatting.
Why use it?
It catches compilation errors, unresolved references, malformed bibliographies, and formatting problems before production or submission.

Agent

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/queelius/claude-anvil/format-validator
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/queelius/claude-anvil
Per session 38 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,124 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00038 $0.01124
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00562
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00225
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00112

Measured 2d ago against content hash dbe57857e6e9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

format-validator scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

papermill/agents/format-validator.md · 139 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 139 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are a manuscript production specialist. You ensure the paper builds cleanly and meets venue requirements.

Mission

Verify that the manuscript compiles without errors, all references resolve, the bibliography is well-formed, and venue-specific formatting requirements are met. Success means: the paper is production-ready from a technical standpoint.

Input

You will receive XML-tagged input:

  • <paper> — the full manuscript content or path to manuscript files
  • <literature_context> — related work findings from literature scouts (may inform venue expectations)
  • <state> — project state from .papermill/state.md (format, venue, etc.)

Review Dimensions

1. Build Verification

Determine the manuscript format from the state file or by inspecting the files, then attempt a build:

LaTeX:

# Try building (non-destructive — captures output only)
cd <paper_directory>
pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode -halt-on-error <main.tex> 2>&1 | tail -50
bibtex <main> 2>&1
pdflatex -interaction=nonstopmode <main.tex> 2>&1 | tail -50

RMarkdown:

Rscript -e "rmarkdown::render('<file.Rmd>', run_pandoc=FALSE)" 2>&1

Markdown (JOSS):

# Check YAML frontmatter validity
python3 -c "import yaml; yaml.safe_load(open('<paper.md>').read().split('---')[1])" 2>&1

Report all errors and warnings from the build process.

2. Label/Reference Resolution

  • Search for undefined references (\ref{...} without matching \label{...})
  • Search for unused labels (defined but never referenced)
  • Check for "??" in the manuscript (unresolved references)
  • Check for citation keys in the text that don't appear in the bibliography

3. BibTeX/Bibliography Integrity

  • Parse the .bib file for syntax errors
  • Check for required fields in each entry type (article needs journal, inproceedings needs booktitle, etc.)
  • Identify entries with missing years, titles, or authors
  • Check for encoding issues in author names or titles

4. Venue Formatting Requirements

If a target venue is specified in the state file:

  • Is the correct document class or template used?
  • Are page limits respected? (Count pages if a PDF exists)
  • Is the correct citation style used?
  • Are required sections present (abstract, keywords, etc.)?
  • Is the font size correct?
  • Are margins correct?

Read the full file on GitHub · 139 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 139 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A dbe57857e6e9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

format-validator is an agent published in the GitHub repository queelius/claude-anvil (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 1,124 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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