Section 5

The suggestion is to remove this section altogether. It is not detailed enough to be useful to a potential user (in contrast to a user manual), there is also not enough information to understand how things are truly implemented, but it still contains details irrelevant for a publication in JHEP.

The section 5 has been moved to the appendix as it has been done for other software related papers published in JHEP such as MadGraph5 (JHEP 1106 (2011) 128). The authors believe that it is important that the information contained in this section, although very basic appears in the official Delphes public note. For the reader it important to know which dataformat can be used as an input to Delphes, how the data-flow works, and finally, what are the basic performances in terms of speed and memory usage, especially true for a "fast-simulation software". A sentence was in the code structure subsection to illustrate the advantage of the modularity of the new framework.

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Figure 1 is a striking illustration of the previous comment. This diagram is both too detailed for a JHEP publication, but too simplistic and not readable.

For example:

• there is no mention of PF, which is an important addition in DELPHES3

added

• there is no mention of PU subtraction, another important addition in DELPHES3,

added

• the workflow is neither specific and accurate

the diagram includes all the major components of Delphes workflow.

• the figure is cut on its right part

the figure is fine, the referee probably uses a non-standard PDF viewer.

• the caption lacks a complete discussion

added

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Figure 2 is yet another illustration of the same problem:

• there is no explanation of what is the grey band in the right plot

the grey band are the error bars. This has been changed in the present version.

• there is not explanation of why there is no grey band in the left plot
• the caption lacks a discussion

added discussion in the caption.

As the suggestion is to remove the section altogether, no further comment is made in this report about it.