Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Date: 2001-05-22 01:55:22 PST

This isn't really (much) of a LaTeX Question, but I wouldn't know where else to post this either, so here it goes: Does something like the changebar-package (and in particular the chbar.sh script) exist which works with finer granularity? The existing script depends on diff, which works linebased. This means that a change of only one letter in the first line of the source of a paragraph _might_ change all subsequent linebreaks, thereby marking the entire paragraph as changed. It would prefer it if only that one letter would be marked (*). As far as I can see, this would however require new versions of (at least) diff and ed (or patch) --- and a new version of rcs might be a good idea too. Does such a beast exist? In addition, I would also like to be able to mark deleted text(*), and ideally even to be able and see who made which changes (for a paper with multiple authors).

Any ideas?

Sven

(*) changebars obviously would not cut it as markers for single letters, nor for deleted text. The latter could be inserted with a line going thru the text, marking it as deleted, while the former could be represented by underlining, or maybe using colour (although this would be invisible in xdvi, so maybe that's not a good idea). Different authors could be marked by different line-styles, or different colours.

> Apparently, you want a program which produces word-based diff's
> Since SuSE Linux 6.4 (maybe also earlier) there is a program called "wdiff"

wdiff -w \\diffdel\{ -x\} -y \\diffinc\{ -z\} oldfile newfile