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I would like to manage different versions of an article (or book; I assume a short article hereafter) made in latex. Looks like version control tools and revision control systems are the way to go (I am not familiar with them). Is there a version/revision control tool that shows the difference between two versions of a pdf file? (We could use this for discussion between multiple authors). I hear that tools such as git, hg and svn are not so good at this.

For my purposes, different versions of same (pdf) file being saved as if separate files is okay (memory is not a big concern as the files are small). But, managing different versions is needed, and I would like to have a pdf comparison to help in revisions (showing comparison for the tex files is not good enough for us). I know there are dedicated tools for pdf comparison. But, I would like to know whether there is a tool that do both. Will document management systems do the job?

I prefer o/s independent solutions.

SecretAgentMan
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Cyriac Antony
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    Welcome to Stack Overflow. Please read the [About] and [Ask] pages, concentrating on which questions are ['on-topic'](https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic) here. This question is off-topic — one of the close reasons on SO is _Seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more — This question is likely to lead to opinion-based answers._ You might be able to ask appropriately on [Software Recommendations](https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/), but check what is [on-topic](https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic) there, too. – Jonathan Leffler Jan 30 '21 at 07:51
  • PDF is a text format, but tracking the differences won't be easy. You'll be better off tracking the changes in the (Latex) source code. The PDF files are probably best treated as generated files, like the libraries or programs made in programming projects. – Jonathan Leffler Jan 30 '21 at 07:53
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    @Jonathan *"PDF is a text format"* - No. You are right, though, to propose tracking the LaTeX sources. – mkl Jan 30 '21 at 19:36
  • Well, parts of PDF are text (Postscript-like instructions) — but parts of a PDF may be various forms of byte stream of arbitrary sequences of binary data. So, a typical PDF is a mixture of text and non-text. But for version control systems, it's not a good (pure) text representation. And tracking the differences won't be easy. I'm not immensely attached to my comment — it was more to get the ball rolling for the OP than anything definitive. – Jonathan Leffler Jan 30 '21 at 19:43
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    @JonathanLeffler: PDF is NOT a text format. PDF is a format containing all the resources to represent content, appearance and metadata. Because is has most components in compressed form, it must be treated as a binary format for transmission. That said, it is not possible to make comparisons on file level. The standard tool to reveal comparisons on the presentation (appearance) level is Acrobat Pro. OTOH, I agree with mkl that a version control really should be made on source document level. – Max Wyss Jan 30 '21 at 23:54
  • To clarify, I am assuming that the file is mostly text. I am making the pdf documents with latex. Comparing the tex files is enough for one author; but not very suitable for discussions between multiple authors. – Cyriac Antony Jan 31 '21 at 02:55

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