I was having a look for graphical file difference viewers in order to get a quick view of the differences between two LaTeX files. One of the things I was looking for was a tool that could handle changed inversions or rearrangments, places where the text has changed both in content and position within the document. I was expecting to find some tool that could show rearrangements like those we see in genomic sequences, but I found none that were free/open source. I understand that Araxis Merge ($$) can do this.

I previously wrote about using ‘bzr’ for version control with LaTeX files. Some people recommend ‘git’, which is a distributed version control system like ‘bzr’. Others use ‘cvs’ or ‘svn’ but I wouldn’t recommend them because they aren’t distributed, so you don’t have the full repository and can’t commit when you’re working offline (AFAIK).

These are my impressions of the few GUI file diff viewers that I tried.

Meld
A GNOME based program.

• + Allows line wrapping
• + Highlights differences at line and word level
• + In-line editing
• + Clean, simple interface (hides gaps but a little uglily)
• — Ugly, unchangeable color scheme
• — Linear mapping (can’t handle rearrangements)

Kompare
A KDE based program.

• — No line wrapping
• + Highlights differences at line level and ~word level (may be able to use wdiff? didn’t try)
• — No in-line editing
• + Clean, simple interface (hides gaps)
• + Good color scheme
• — Linear mapping (can’t handle rearrangements)

TkDiff
A Tk program.

• — No line wrapping
• — Only highlights differences at line level by default (may be able to use wdiff? didn’t try)
• — No in-line edits (opens up simple editor, but not to the right line)
• — Ugly interface (Tk; leaves explicit gaps)
• + Good color scheme
• — Linear mapping (can’t handle rearrangements)

latexdiff
Not the same as the others here, latexdiff compares two files and merges them into a single .tex file which is then rendered in order to show the differences like ‘Track Changes’ in Word or OpenOffice. The output is very nice but the requirement that the document renders properly was a hindrance in one comparison I wanted to do. This would be good for submitting as the “changes” file required by some journals during manuscript revision in which you need to point out every change made between revisions.

• + Highlights differences at word and higher levels
• + Easy command line interface: latexdiff oldfile newfile > diff.tex
• + Good color scheme
• — Linear mapping (can’t handle rearrangements)

Here are a couple of good discussion threads on this and the related issue of collaboration:

Discussion on Debian Science List
Discussion on Ask Slashdot
Discussion on Academic Productivity
ScribTex — a online collaborative wiki-like LaTeX editor

Tags:   latex · linux · open access · science · scriptNo Comments