Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Tracking changes in LaTeX

A rather long time ago, I had asked how to track changes in Emacs/LaTeX, along the lines of what Word can do. There were many suggestions at the time, along the lines of using CVS, and one person had even mentioned 'texdiff'.

I actually got around to trying latexdiff today, and it actually works quite well. Given an old and new LaTeX document, it will output a "diff" TeX file that when compiled marks changes in coded colors; blue for insertions, red for deletions. People I know use this all the time for managing changes with collaborators.

The program itself can be run as a standalone Perl script, so it's quite portable. I plan to use it more often.

2 comments:

  1. Quite neat. I was looking for something like this to track changes made in latex.. BTW, we have a couple more similarities.. The name Venkatasubramanian and Stanford.. I'm at the Flow Physics and computation divistion at Stanford.

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  2. Cool,

    There is a more manual way to indicate changes on a latex file. For more details check : http://trackchanges.sourceforge.net/

    May be both solutions can benefit from each other.

    Cheers,
    Epi

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