A Note To The Reviewer ======================= Thank you for your feedback on the article. We have tried our best to accommodate the changes, additions and/or corrections suggested by you. I'd like to note that this article, which is a written version of the talk given by the speaker at the SALT Science Conference in June, 2015, is aimed at presenting to the audience, the challenges faced by us during data reduction and analysis. No science results were presented in the talk since we were and are still in the early stages of interpreting the results. Once these results are in a presentable form, they will be submitted for publication in a suitable journal. We have tried our best to accommodate all other additions / changes without violating the 8 page limit set for the article. Please let us know if any other changes are necessary. Responses to individual comments are given below. Regards, Kaustubh Vaghmare --- Manuscript number: PoS(SSC2015)012 Title: Star Formation Histories of S0 Galaxies Speaker: K. Vaghmare Science and Contents ===================== These proceedings describe RSS observations of a sample of S0 galaxies in order to understand their place in galaxy evolution with respect to elliptical and spirals. Specifically, the authors describe using long-slit optical spectroscopy along with stellar population synthesis modeling, to understand the properties of an S0 galaxy as a function of position. They outline various challenges to their methodology, and a very short summary and conclusions section. I do have a few issues with the text: - The sample of S0 galaxies being observed is never carefully discussed, and should be included at the beginning of Section 2, KV: Added to S2, para 1. We had to modify some existing material in order to honor the 8 page limit. - Figure 2 does not have any axis labels, and the colored lines (which indicate, I believe, extracted apertures) are not described well in the text or the figure caption. KV: Changed text. Labels added. - The usage of "diffusion mapping" as described in Section 3.2 is confusing, especially for a conference proceedings. This description should be clarified for ease of understanding the method used. KV: Changed text. Again, due to space constraints a detailed explanation of diffusion mapping is not possible. Further, diffussion mapping is a technique whose detailed treatment is available in many standard texts on statistical methods. Further, Richards et al 2009 explain how to employ the method in case of spectra. (BibCode: 2009MNRAS.399.1044R) - The Summary section (Section 4) should be expanded to include more science results using the methods described above. In its current form, the section describes some of the obtained age and metallicity gradients, but nothing is said of what this says about the S0 population. KV: Science results are preliminary. We would like to explain them once we have finished the detailed analysis at which time we will publish them in a suitable journal. The key idea of this proceedings article as well as the talk is/was to illustrate the difficulties faced by us and the solutions adopted for the same. No science results were presented during the actual talk and thus are not being presented in the proceeding as well. - This paper has numerous typographical and grammatical errors throughout which should be corrected. KV: An attempt has been made to correct these errors. Please let us know in case of further issues. Formatting, Language and Style =============================== Throughout the paper: - '-' in a sentence: use a long dash KV: Done. - comma before i.e. (e.g., page 3, line 4) KV: Done. Section titles: use capital letters only for names KV: Done. References: please give the titles in {\emph } KV: Done. Detailed comments ------------------ Abstract, line 5: carrying out detailed -> carrying out a detailed KV: Done. page 2, line 9: called as lenticular -> called lenticular KV: Done. page 2, line 16: Further, -> Furthermore, KV: Done. page 2, line 18: relation to understanding -> relation to the understanding KV: Done. page 2, line 19: in many of such -> in many such KV: Done page 3, line 17: pseudobulge -> pseudobulges (in both cases) KV: Done. page 4, line 11: use \AA ngstr\"om KV: Done. page 4, line 25: isses -> issues KV: Done. Sec 3.1, line 2: If SNR is -> If the SNR is KV: Done. Fig 2 caption: what are the coloured lines? From the text I had expected pairs of colours. KV: Changed caption and text. Pairs of colours would have been ideal however because of the way the code, which computes the apertures, has evolved over time, the marking requires non trivial changes to the code. We've added text that should hopefully make things clearer. Fig 2: add labels and units to the axes KV: Done. Fig 3: add units to the x-axis Figure is taken as is from Richards et al 2009. (2009MNRAS.399.1044R) And the units of X-axis do not matter in our opinion. This is because the idea of the figure is to illustrate the effect on a set of the spectra, of using the diffusion mapping technique. page 6, 8th-last line: is there a reference for MILES? Added. Sec 4, line 7: have -> has Done. References, [12]: give publisher and town Publisher added.