mihaiconstantin / difftex

A lightweight script around `latexdiff` for comparing and generating track-changes for version-controlled LaTeX documents.

difftex - compare LaTeX files in git repositories

difftex is a shell script wrapper around latexdiff that can be used to compare changes in .tex files between two different git commits (e.g., to compare the changes between HEAD~1 and HEAD). It shares a similar purpose as Git Latexdiff but it is likely narrower in scope. difftex is build for macOS and other Unix-based operating systems.

Installation

difftex can be installed by running:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mihaiconstantin/difftex/main/install.sh | sudo bash

The command above will perform the following steps:

1. Clone the mihaiconstantin/difftex repository into a temporary directory.
2. Copy difftex.sh to /usr/local/bin/difftex.
3. Adjust permissions and make difftex executable.
4. Remove the temporary directory.

Uninstalling

To uninstall difftex simply remove the script as:

sudo rm /usr/local/bin/difftex

Updating

To update difftex just re-run installation command above which will replace the current /usr/local/bin/difftex with the newest one from the GitHub repository.

Usage

The script takes four arguments:

• $1 (required): The name of the main .tex file to compare between commits.
• $2: The older commit or reference to a commit. The default is HEAD~1.
• $3: The newer commit or reference to a commit. The default is HEAD.
• $4: The path or directory name where to produce and store the output. The default is ./tmp

Example of how to use the script:

difftex file.tex
difftex file.tex HEAD~1 HEAD tmp
difftex file.tex branch-one branch-two tmp
difftex file.tex tag-one tag-two tmp

The annotated .pdf document can be found in the output folder (i.e., ./tmp or the one specified).

Custom latexdiff options

In more advances cases, users may want to customize what kind of markup is generated. To achieve this, latexdiff offers a wide range of options (i.e., see latexdiff --help). To maximize compatibility across projects, difftex runs the latexdiff command with more or less the default options, i.e.,:

latexdiff \
    --type=UNDERLINE \
    --append-textcmd="enquote" \
    --allow-spaces \
    --math-markup=3 \
    --flatten \

    # Reminder of the 'latexdiff' command.
    ...

If a specific project requires running latexdiff with different or more options, one can edit the file /usr/local/bin/difftex to adjust the latexdiff command call accordingly. For example, adding the following (i.e., see below) will instruct latexdiff to include markup for changes in the Abstract section of a manuscript.

--append-context2cmd="abstract" \

If one is interested in ignoring changes for entire environments (e.g., the figure environment), the following trick can be used (i.e., see this answer for more information):

--config="PICTUREENV=(?:picture|DIFnomarkup|figure)[\w\d*@]*" \

In the example above, the addition |figure instructs latexdiff to also ignore the figure environment. This trick can be further extended to an arbitrary number of environments (e.g., sidewaysfigure).

For a full overview of the capabilities of latexdiff make sure to check the documentation by running latexdiff --help.

Note. To enable changes in .bib files please check this answer.

Release Notes

See the CHANGELOG file.

Contributing

Any contributions, suggestions, or bug reports are welcome and greatly appreciated.

License

difftex is licensed under the MIT license.