LaTeXdiff

Remember about the following recurrent scenario: you are writing some paper using with one or several colleagues, you edit the paper on your side and you would like to send the updated version to the others, emphasizing the changes you made in such a manner that your colleagues can quickly figure out what was updated. You can rely on the *nix common tool diff, or on the diff-ing capabilities of your preferred text editor. This is what I did until recently.

A colleague of mines had the excellent idea to show me the latexdiff tool, which is freely available on CTAN. Here is a small sample of its capabilites: let’s assume that I received the following LaTeX document (text shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia), rendering to

After several corrections, the final version should sound something like

Using the simple command

latexdiff uncorrected.tex corrected.tex > diff.tex

we get the following:

latexdiff will definitively be part of my toolbox from now on!