General ⇒ Distinguish & mark new text between document versions

[Davidsv]

Greetings,
I'm working on a master's degree and I'm presenting weekly updates of the thesis to my supervisors. I do maintain a changelist, however they have requested that I also color (or somehow distinguish) the new text from the previous version. This includes whole chapters but more importantly small changes all over the place. I can use the normal text color package, however I wonder if there is an easier way to tell LaTeX (I'm using TeXnicCenter) to automatically do this for me? Otherwise I'd have to manually add and remove coloring for every bit of text in between every version. It does not strictly need to be coloring, but any simple way to distinguish the new text from the old, including small changes such as a couple of new words here and there.. Any help would be greatly appreciated

[frabjous]

Perhas latexdiff would offer what you needed.

[gmedina]

Some other options could be (depending on the nature of the "mark" that you use to signal changes) the changebar package, the leftbar environment from the framed package, or the todo or todonotes package.

[localghost]

Perhaps the TeX Catalogue can help [1]. It lists some useful packages for version control.

[1] The TeX Catalogue Online, Topic Index - Managing different versions of your document


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten

[Davidsv]

Thanks. I tried latexdiff because it looked pretty interesting but after installing Perl I get the following error message when I try to run the program:
Unknown encoding 'ansinew' at C:\Program Files (x86)\MiKTeX 2.8\scripts\latexdiff\perl\latexdiff.pl line 514

I'll look into your other suggestions now too, and report back.

[Davidsv]

I'll use the changebar for now, not really optimal but I want to spend my time typing not fighting a program - although if anybody know how to solve the problem I mentioned with latexdiff, that would be great

[frabjous]

Thanks. I tried latexdiff because it looked pretty interesting but after installing Perl I get the following error message when I try to run the program:
Unknown encoding 'ansinew' at C:\Program Files (x86)\MiKTeX 2.8\scripts\latexdiff\perl\latexdiff.pl line 514

I actually don't have much personal experience with latexdiff, but is there are line in your document that reads:

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\usepackage[ansinew]{inputenc}

If so, unless you know for sure that you have characters from that encoding that are not part of the standard latin1 set, try using instead:

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\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}

or else run latexdiff with the option:

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--encoding=latin1

Some details about this can be found on page of the the latexdiff manual.