When I write a paper, it usu­ally goes through many ver­sions before being sub­mit­ted to a jour­nal. I keep track of the dif­fer­ent ver­sions by renam­ing the file when I’m about to make major changes, or when I receive a new ver­sion from a coau­thor. The files are named file1.tex, file2.tex, etc. where “file” is replaced by some­thing more meaningful.

It is often use­ful to be able to com­pare ver­sions to see what changes have been made, espe­cially when work­ing with coau­thors. It is pos­si­ble to use text com­par­i­son soft­ware such as Com­pare It!, but LaTeX files often have insignif­i­cant changes due to line wrap­ping which make no dif­fer­ence to the out­put, and there is no point in iden­ti­fy­ing these changes.

I recently dis­cov­ered a great solu­tion which finds real LaTeX changes and ignores changes due to line wrap­ping. It is LaTeXd­iff.The good news is that Mik­TeX users already have it, although you prob­a­bly don’t realise it.

To use it, you need both Mik­TeX and Perl installed on your com­puter. I’ll assume you already have Mik­TeX. If you cre­ate R pack­ages for Win­dows, you will also have Perl. Oth­er­wise, one sim­ple way to get Perl is to install Rtools.

The sim­plest way to pro­ceed once Perl is installed, is to use the fol­low­ing com­mand (from a DOS prompt)

latexdiff-so file1.tex file2.tex > diff.tex

If you are using Mik­TeX, then the latexdiff-so com­mand should work from any DOS prompt. Then just process the file diff.tex as you nor­mally do (prob­a­bly in WinEdt).

Related Posts:

• Syn­chro­niz­ing WinEdt and pdf files
• Get­ting a LaTeX sys­tem set up on a PC
• Main­tain­ing local LaTeX files
• Using TeXs­tu­dio with SumatraPDF
• Track­ing changes in text files