This post is just to introduce two new tools I found.
LatexDiff is a tool that compares two tex files and generates a third marking the differences between them. It is great, for instance, when you update a thesis or article, and want to show the differences to your advisor or colleague.
Beware that this tool is not without mistakes. Sometimes it fails to mark a difference, specially in equations.
The other tools is Latexpand, which
reads a .tex file and replace input and include commands with the content of
the tex.
This tools isn’t really necessary in a normal context because latexdiff can do
this expansion (or flattening) if you use the argument --flatten. I haven’t
tried it, though.
What I did was use them with git. If you want to compare two files under git, one simple option is
git checkout old-commit
latexpand main.tex > oldmain.tex
git checkout new-commit
latexpend main.tex > newmain.tex
latexdiff oldmain.tex newmain.tex > diffmain.tex
I’m still going to try it under git difftool.