ReportLint: Reviewed Template Specifications for Academic Report Format Checking

Compliance of an academic report with its format document is more than comparing fonts and margins. Written guidelines may contradict specimen pages, and some rules are only applicable to certain sections. ReportLint allows to transform these guidelines into the fixed specification prior to checking a Word report. Its validators interpret supported Office Open XML properties, differentiate between violations and checks which require further verification. The evaluation was carried out on one format document and one report during the development. A separate AI assistance performed inspection and marked 20 out of 32 selected criteria as failing. In three checker implementations, it identified at least one true violation in 4, 9, and 18 out of 20 criteria. The final implementation resulted in 2,046 check items, including 324 failures presented in 20 groups. These results represent progress in the development report and not the accuracy on previously unseen reports. Requirements involve abstract meaning, captions in images, and rendered page geometry and require further approaches.