[Tex/LaTex] “Track changes” in LaTeX

Question

I am writing a scientific paper with my collaborator. We have submitted a version to a journal and now we got a review from them, so we need to fix a few things. In Microsoft Word there is the option to "track changes", which displays the deleted text as crossed out and the new text bolded (if I remember the details correctly). Is there a way to achieve a similar result in LaTeX?

I was thinking to create a new file for the revised version and then write a script which would basically compare the two files and make the differences either bold or crossed out before sending it to latex. Is there a tool that already does it?

Answer 1

You can process your TeX files with the Perl program latexdiff that is included with most LaTeX distributions.

From the manual:

Briefly, latexdiff is a utility program to aid in the management of revisions of latex documents. It compares two valid latex files, here called old.tex and new.tex, finds significant differences between them (i.e., ignoring the number of white spaces and position of line breaks), and adds special commands to highlight the differences.