When writting an article, you may want to get a diff of a TeX file to send it to your advisor, collaborators or reviewers. The tool latexdiff generates a diff of two TeX files but it does not manage inputs, includes or bibliography. Also, when you are using a RCS (Revision Control System) like Git, at first you have to get all the files what could be laborious.
That's why I wrote rcs-latexdiff, a tool written in Python to generate a diff of two versions of a TeX file based on a RCS repository.
An example of output produced by rcs-latexdiff after its compilation
Usage
This tool manage inputs and its usage is quite simple:
$ rcs-latexdiff [OPTIONS] filename old_commit new_commit
Examples
For example, if the file paper.tex is in a Git repository, you could do:
$ rcs-latexdiff paper.tex HEAD~1 HEAD
to get a diff between the second to last and the last commit.
You could also use branch names. For example, to compare a version submitted to a conference (branch submission-version) and the final version (branch camera-ready-version):
$ rcs-latexdiff paper.tex submission-version camera-ready-version
Then, compile the diff file using your favorite TeX compiler. For example, rubber:
$ rubber -d diff.tex
Install rcs-latexdiff
Instructions are explained on the Github page rcs-latexdiff.
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