NAME
texdiff - Compares two (La)TeX documents to create a merged version
showing changes, similar to that of 'Change Tracking' in some word
processors.
SYNOPSIS
texdiff [--nofloats|-n] old.tex new.tex [diff.tex]
DESCRIPTION
The first two files are compared and a new TeX file is output. When the
output file is processed with (La)TeX it marks new changes with blue and
old text with red with a strike-through line. Furthermore, passages with
changes are marked at the margin with grey bars by the LaTeX "changebar"
package (although only after running "dvips", in "xdvi" the bars are one
inch too far left to compensate the one inch offset inserted by TeX
printer drivers).
"texdiff" uses and therefore requires the "wdiff" command to insert
these marks. If LaTeX macros are included in those striked out or
underlined passages, the latex run will most likely fail. The source of
most problems lies in "wdiff" tearing apart pairs of braces. Therefore
"texdiff" is a perl script that calls "wdiff" internally and fixes
"wdiff"'s output by re-pairing braces again and handling some commonly
used LaTeX macros.
For texdiff to work, the following LaTeX code must be inserted in the
preamble of the LaTeX document:
\usepackage{xcolor} \usepackage{ulem} \usepackage{changebar}
\newcommand\TLSins[1]{\cbstart{}\textcolor{ins}{\uline{#1}}\cbend{}}
\newcommand\TLSdel[1]{\cbdelete{}\textcolor{del}{\sout{#1}}}
Define editing colors "ins" and "del" with existing "xcolor" color
names: \colorlet{ins}{blue} \colorlet{del}{red}
Or from scratch: \definecolor{ins}{rgb}{0, 0.5, 0}
These macros are NOT automatically interted at \begin{document} like the
original scripts did (see the ACKNOWLEDGMENTS section below), because
this will not work on files of a multi-file document (those included by
\include or \input). Furthermore, if you insert the macros manually, you
can tune them as you like, i. e. change text color or position of
changebars. Have a look at the documentation of the ulem and changebar
packages on how to do this!
OPTIONS
--nofloats, -n
If given, skips contents of figure environments, but does show
insertions and deletions in the caption commands. This is done to
avoid complex messups in subfloat or complex figure environments.
--debug, -d
Turns on debugging. Temporary files that contain numbered braces are
kept and a raw difference file is written as output file name
appended with '-wdiff.tex'. In addition, several regular expression
diagnostics are printed. Warning: produces a lot of output.
AUTHOR
Mark Doll <markdoll<AT>gmx.net>, Cengiz Gunay
<cengique<AT>users.sf.net>.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
* Version 0.4, by CG, 2009/09/15. Added use of GetOpt to take an
optional parameter to skip float (e.g., figure or table) contents.
Added an optional debug mode. Embedded POD documentation. Fixed
problem with insertion and deletions appearing in the middle of
sectioning commands by throwing off LaTeX.
* Version 0.3, modified by Cengiz Gunay <
[email protected]>,
2009/06/30. Added some Latex commands that should be excluded and
fixed handling of '\%' characters.
* Version 0.2, is a perl implementation of TeXdiff by Mark Doll
<
[email protected]>, 2006/08/09. It was derived from the original
bash and perl scripts created by Robert Maron <
[email protected]>,
available at
http://www.robmar.net/TexDiff/. This version of texdiff
is available at
http://mark.doll.name/texdiff/.
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
Copyleft 2006-2009, Mark Doll and Cengiz Gunay
This library is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
