Track changes: svn + latex

Question

In MS Word, there's a nice feature called "track changes" that allows the program to track edits. This is useful when collaborating with others because you can enable various visualization modes where it's easy to see what others have changed.

I'm in the process of editing a large amount of documentation written in LaTeX and stored in a subversion repository. I'd like to be able to easily highlight changes between different revisions. Does anyone know of a good system for taking a pair of revisions of a LaTeX file and automatically generating word-level (not just line-level) diff markup (i.e. one color or style for unchanged text, another color for added content, another for deleted, etc.)?

Answer 1

You might have a look at latexdiff, which takes two latex documents and produces a new latex file highlighting the changes between the two documents with underlines and strikeouts (on a word-by-word basis, as you requested). See a screenshot of the results here.

Usage example:

~/bin/latexdiff old.tex new.tex > diff.tex

Also it appears that LyX can track changes.

Answer 2

Look at latexdiff

Answer 3

Try using the trackchanges project hosted at sourceforge. It can work both with and without GUI support. Needs installation of python. Link is http://sourceforge.net/projects/trackchanges/