Using latexdiff with git

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Do you mean something like the following?

~/bin/git-latexdiff

#!/bin/bash
TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d /tmp/git-latexdiff.XXXXXX)
latexdiff "$1" "$2" > $TMPDIR/diff.tex
pdflatex -interaction nonstopmode -output-directory $TMPDIR $TMPDIR/diff.tex
evince $TMPDIR/diff.pdf
rm -rf $TMPDIR

~/.gitconfig

[difftool.latex]
        cmd = git-latexdiff \"$LOCAL\" \"$REMOTE\"
[difftool]
        prompt = false
[alias]
        ldiff = difftool -t latex

You can then use the diff by running git ldiff HEAD~1, for example.

Answer 3

There is another option which has become available since the answers here were written. I think that it will be preferred by some as it does not require any additional packages.

Beginning in version 1.0.1, latexdiff has come with a version of latexdiff-vc which supports git. Simply running

    latexdiff-vc [ latexdiff-options ] [ latexdiff-vc-options ] -r [rev1] [-r rev2] file1.tex [ file2.tex ...]

will run latexdiff on the specified versions from its best guess of the version control system in use. The --git option specifies that it should assume git. This can also be specified by running latexdiff-git, which has git as the default VCS.

The option --pdf will run pdflatex (and bibtex if necessary) on the output.

See the latexdiff manual for more information.

Answer 4

Since this question is frequently visited: Here is a blog-posting on a really great bash script here. The maintainer says:

---

Latexbatchdiff

A bash script that utilizes the brilliant perl script “latexdiff” in a latex project that is maintained in git.

It does support multiple pdf files, and it automatically creates the pdf.

---

You can get a 'diff' between every commit and your current version, easily. It is very helpful. Some classes seem to brake the code of the soul package, which is used to highlight the changes. I found it helpful to add to my preamble this code to prevent any difficulties:

\providecommand{\DIFadd}[1]{{\protect\color{blue}#1}} %DIF PREAMBLE
\providecommand{\DIFdel}[1]{{\protect\color{red}\protect\scriptsize{#1}}}

What's been added, is printed in blue, what has been deleted, in small red type.

Answer 5

I recently created a rather nice Python script which works both on Mercurial and git repositories. It also supports bibtex and diffing against files that are not yet in the repository. See this blog post for more details. The code can be downloaded from bitbucket:

hg clone https://bitbucket.org/paulhiemstra/scm-latexdiff

or download a tar ball. Some examples of the usage of the script on the command line:

 # for hg
 scm-latexdiff 4:spam.tex
 scm-latexdiff 4:spam.tex 6:spam.tex
 # for git
 scm-latexdiff 87213:spam.tex
 scm-latexdiff 87213:spam.tex 97123:spam.tex
 # You can also diff against non-commited (local) files
 scm-latexdiff local:spam.tex
 scm-latexdiff 2:spam.tex local:spam.tex

The script should work on all platforms that support Python. If you have any suggestions, or bug reports, you can submit an new issue in the issue tracker.

EDIT: A new version of the program now also supports multi-file latex documents. Especially for reports and books this can be important. Note that you need a recent version of latexdiff (2007) to be able to work with multi-file documents.

To install the program, clone the repository or download a tar ball and go to the directory where you extracted/cloned the tool and type (note that you probably need to be root for this to work):

python setup.py install

To install to a non-standard directory tree (e.g. in your home directory) use --prefix:

python setup.py install --prefix=/home/spam/

Do remember to add /home/spam/lib/python2.x/site-packages/ to your PYTHONPATH environment variable.

Answer 6

This does not work in a documment with included files. I have a very inelegant python script (see below). Any ideas to improve it?

~/.gitconfig

ldiff = !latexdiff-git.py

latexdiff-git.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
# A git integration for latex diff
# Using git diff will be faster but more work.

import os
from os.path import join, split
import sys
import shutil
import logging
import tempfile
from optparse import OptionParser

if __name__ == '__main__':
    parser = OptionParser()
    parser.add_option("-o", "--output", dest="output", default='diff', help="name of the output file")
    parser.add_option("-t", "--temp", dest="tmp_path", default=None, help="name of the temporary folder")
    #parser.add_option("-1", "--one", dest="", default=None, help="Uses pdflatex in the oldest commit")

    (options, args) = parser.parse_args()

    if not options.tmp_path:
        options.tmp_path = tempfile.mkdtemp()

    pdf = '%s.pdf' % options.output
    texout = '%s.tex' % options.output
    basedir = os.getcwd()
    dir1 = join(options.tmp_path, '1')
    dir2 = join(options.tmp_path, '2')

    if len(args) == 2:
        commit1 = args[0]
        commit2 = 'HEAD'
        texin = args[1]
    else:
        commit1 = args[0]
        commit2 = args[1]
        texin = args[2]

    texin = '%s.tex' % texin
    file1 = join(dir1, texin)
    file2 = join(dir2, texin)

    shutil.rmtree(options.tmp_path, ignore_errors = True)

    (hdl, header) = tempfile.mkstemp()

    print('Temporary path: %s' % options.tmp_path)
    print('Temporary file: %s' % header)

    os.system(r'echo \\begin{verbatim} >> %s' % header)
    os.system('echo %s >> %s' % (texin, header))
    os.system(r'echo \\end{verbatim} >> %s' % header)
    os.system(r'echo \\hrule >> %s' % header)
    os.system(r'echo \\begin{verbatim} >> %s' % header)
    os.system('echo From: %s >> %s' % (commit1, header))
    shutil.copytree(basedir, dir1)
    os.chdir(dir1)
    os.system('git checkout %s' % commit1)
    os.system('git log -1 >> %s' % header)
    os.system(r'echo \\end{verbatim} >> %s' % header)

    os.system(r'echo \\hrule >> %s' % header)

    os.system(r'echo \\begin{verbatim} >> %s' % header)
    os.system('echo To: %s >> %s' % (commit2, header))
    shutil.copytree(basedir, dir2)
    os.chdir(dir2)
    os.system('git checkout %s' % commit2)
    os.system('git log -1 >> %s' % header)
    os.system(r'echo \\end{verbatim} >> %s' % header)

    (hdl, header_name) = split(header)
    os.system('latexdiff --flatten %s %s > %s' % (join(dir1, texin), join(dir2, texin), texout))
    #os.system(r"sed -i 's/$/\/\/\//g' %s " % header)
    shutil.copy(header, join(dir2, '%s.tex' % header_name))
    os.system(r"sed -i 's/begin{document}/begin{document}\\include{%s}/g' %s " % (header_name, texout))
    os.system('pdflatex %s' % texout)
    shutil.copy(texout, basedir)
    shutil.copy(pdf, basedir)
    os.chdir(basedir)
    shutil.rmtree(options.tmp_path, ignore_errors = True)
    os.remove(header)
    if os.name == 'nt':
        os.filestart(pdf)
    elif os.name == 'posix':
        os.system('/usr/bin/xdg-open %s' % pdf)
    else:
        os.system('open %s' % pdf)

Answer 7

rcs-latexdiff tool can do that. It can make a latexdiff of different versions of a same file within a RCS repository. It also manages included files.

The basic usage is:

$ rcs-latexdiff [OPTIONS] filename old_commit new_commit

So for example,

$ rcs-latexdiff paper.tex HEAD~1 HEAD

creates an output file diff.tex that is the latexdiff of the paper.tex file for the two last revisions. Then, it's up to you to compile the output file using your favorite compiler.

So, in your case, if you want to get a pdf highlighting changes between submitted version of a paper and its camera-ready version, you could do:

$ rcs-latexdiff report.tex branch_submitted_version branch_camera_ready_version
$ rubber -d diff.tex

These commands create a diff.tex (highlighting differences between two branches) and rubber generates a pdf.

The ultimate goal of this tool is to support all the different RCS software. At the moment, it only supports SVN and Git. You can find install instructions on Github page. Feel free to use, reports bugs and contribute ;)

Answer 8

use this in case you are on windows, no installment, just a simple bat script It works perfectly on windows10, miktex2.9:

https://github.com/redreamality/git-latexdiff