LaTeX tools for revision

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.

• latex
• diff
• revision
• xournal