Best practices for marking changes of LaTeX documents

When submitting academic manuscript, it’s usually mandatory to submit the marked changes for revisions/resubmissions. Word is particularly handy in this regard. But if your manuscript is consists of lots math formula, e.g. in the field of deep learning, LaTeX is a more common choice. In this case, latexdiff is the go-to choice for generating the document with marked changes.

Install latexdiff

Follow the instruction on the official documentation:

GitHub — ftilmann/latexdiff: Compares two latex files and marks up significant differences between them. Releases on www.ctan.org and mirrors

Prepare files

Copy the whole folder of the two versions of $\LaTeX$ documents that are being compared, say one is draft@0 while the other is draft@2. Make sure that each of them can be successfully compiled.

About the figures and other resources

If you stored figures in the other folder, you may have deleted or rearranged some figures as you write the new version of the draft. Therefore, it’s advisable to make a local copy of the figures folder under the folder of each folder, and use match & replace to batch edit the image paths in the .tex file.

The same principle applies to also other resources, e.g. .bib files for your reference. In this case, the versional draft folder serves as a snapshot of a major version - typically before a submission/resubmission. Although you may have been using Git for version control, my experience is keeping the major versions in parallel folders are more convenient than scrolling down the lengthy git log when you need to replicate these versions. More over, it's a prerequisite for latexdiff to work.

P.S. Another approach is removing all \includegraphics[...]{...} in the drafts since usually only keeping the captions are suffice. This can be achieved by search and replace the following patterns with empty string using regular expression in VS Code:

\\includegraphics.*

Bibliography

I prefer to keep the in-text citations but delete the bibliography section since the changes of bibliography won’t be marked.

Run the command

Make a folder for the marked changes file, say diff@1-0/:

mkdir diff@1-0
latexdiff draft@0/paper.tex draft@1/paper.tex > draft@1-0/diff.tex

Noted that the path to the drafts should go down to the exact .tex file, ie. draft@0/paper.texand draft@1/paper.tex, with the former one as the old version and the later one as the new version. draft@1-0/diff.tex file will be generated with marked changes between these two .tex, which is an ordinary $\LaTeX$ file that can be compiled separately. However, before compiling it, remember to place all [[#About the figures and other resources|figures and other resources]] to the folder of diff.tex.

P.S. Here only the figures of the newer version needed to be placed since only these will be shown in the marked changes document.

Bug fixing

\hspace{0pt}

With newer versions of LaTeX, a common error can be triggered by the \hspace{0pt} in the generated diff.tex.

citing — latexdiff with \cite commands gives output with apparently mismatched braces — TeX — LaTeX Stack Exchange

To fix it, simply remove them all:

\hspace{0pt}

Other trouble makers

• \vskip<length> may be inserted with text generated by latexdiff. Check each \vskip command to restore them back to the correct form.
• Same to \items, check each of them.
• Some complex tables may leads to odd failures. If the document can’t compile, considering deleting some of them. The same as figures, only keeping captions are usually enough.