[Tex/LaTex] Using latexdiff with git

gitlatexdiffrevision control

I'd like to be able to use latexdiff with git. At the moment I have an alias in my .gitconfig file for a word-based diff:

[alias]
 wdiff = diff --color-words

but is it possible to make an alias that will use latexdiff then compile the output and open the created dvi/pdf file?

Probably the best approach to this is using git difftool, but has anyone already made an appropriate script?

Best Answer

The most complete and general solution today is probably git-latexdiff, here:

https://gitlab.com/git-latexdiff/git-latexdiff

The script internally checks out the full tree for the specified revisions, and calls latexdiff with the --flatten option (or can call latexpand), hence this works if the document is split into multiple .tex files.

The script contains many special-cases to make it work for as many cases as possible (it received contributions from more than 10 contributors, most of them being "make it work for my use-case too").

Note: I'm the main author.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] texdiff for multi-file documents in subversion

I know coded the following Perl script which calls svn diff in summary mode to get the changed files. It extracts these using svn cat into two different directories and calls latexdiff on each modified file. It modifies the TEXINPUTS variable to load files first from the diff directory instead of the current one. This avoids the copying of all unchanged files. Finally the main file is compile using latexmk.

The usage is perl <scriptfile> <mainfile> <rev a> <rev b>.

It is absolutely not fool-proof so far, but is more general as the shell script linked to in the comments. Please test it and provide some feedback.

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my @FILES;

my $rpath = '.r';

my ($mainfile,$REVA,$REVB) = @ARGV;
my $dpath = ".diff-${REVA}-${REVB}";

open(my $pipe, '-|', "svn diff --summarize -r${REVA}:${REVB}") or die;
while (<$pipe>) {
    next if not /^M.{7}(.*\.tex)$/;
    push @FILES, $1;
}
close ($pipe);

exit (1) if not @FILES;

mkdir $rpath . $REVA;
mkdir $rpath . $REVB;
mkdir $dpath;

foreach my $file (@FILES) {
    print $file, "\n";
    $file =~ /^(.*)\//;
    my $dir  = $1 || "";
    my $dira = $rpath . $REVA . '/' . $dir;
    my $dirb = $rpath . $REVB . '/' . $dir;
    my $ddir = $dpath         . '/' . $dir;
    mkdir $dira if not -e $dira;
    mkdir $dirb if not -e $dirb;
    mkdir $ddir if not -e $ddir;
    system("svn cat -r${REVA} '$file' > '${rpath}${REVA}/$file'");
    system("svn cat -r${REVB} '$file' > '${rpath}${REVB}/$file'");
    system("latexdiff '${rpath}${REVA}/$file' '${rpath}${REVB}/$file' > '${dpath}/$file'");
}

if (not exists $ENV{"TEXINPUTS"} || $ENV{"TEXINPUTS"} eq '') {
    $ENV{"TEXINPUTS"} = "$dpath:.:";
}
else {
    $ENV{"TEXINPUTS"} = "$dpath:" . $ENV{"TEXINPUTS"};
}

system("latexmk -pdf $mainfile")

[Tex/LaTex] How to create a ‘summary of changes’ with latexdiff

There is a new functionality in latexdiff since version 1.1.0 that outputs only those pages where a change has been made.

Check out option --only-changes to latexdiff-vc or options -s ONLYCHANGEDPAGE or -s ZLABEL for latexdiff. The former is much more convenient as the post-processing is done behind the scenes.

(I know this question is really old, but the improvement to latexdiff in this respect since the original answers were posted are significant)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] texdiff for multi-file documents in subversion

[Tex/LaTex] How to create a ‘summary of changes’ with latexdiff

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