pdfdiff

Produces a PDF from two LaTeX sources with all changes visually marked — insertions in dark green, deletions in red strikethrough by default. Both colours are configurable.

Wraps latexdiff and handles the full build pipeline: bibliography generation, multi-file projects, and arXiv-style embedded .bbl files.

Usage

pdfdiff [OPTIONS] <original> <modified>

Each source can be:

Form	Example
Git branch name	main
.tex file path	paper/main.tex
Project directory	paper/

For directories and branches, the file containing \documentclass is used as the root automatically.
diff.tex and diff.pdf are written to ./diff/ by default, or to the directory specified with --output.

Disclaimer

Never use your active project directory as the output path. The modified source is copied into the output directory during the build — any existing files there can be overwritten.

Options

Flag	Default	Description
--output <DIR>	./diff/	Directory to write diff.tex and diff.pdf
--no-cleanup	—	Keep intermediate build files in the output directory
--add-color <COLOUR>	green!50!black	Colour for inserted text
--del-color <COLOUR>	red	Colour for deleted text

Colours accept any xcolor expression: named colours (blue, orange), DVIPSNames (NavyBlue, ForestGreen), or mixed expressions (red!70!black, blue!50!white).

Examples

# Compare two git branches, output to ./diff/
pdfdiff main feature-branch

# Compare two directories
pdfdiff paper-v1/ paper-v2/

# Compare specific .tex files
pdfdiff old/main.tex new/main.tex

# Write output to a custom directory
pdfdiff main feature-branch --output out/

# Keep all intermediate build files
pdfdiff main feature-branch --no-cleanup

# Custom colours
pdfdiff --add-color blue --del-color orange old.tex new.tex

Requirements

Works on Linux and macOS. Windows 10+ should be supported as long as the dependencies are installed.

Required:

• latexdiff — usually part of TeX Live / MiKTeX
• pdflatex
• git (for branch inputs)

Optional but recommended:

• latexpand — enables --flatten so \input/\include directives are inlined; ships with TeX Live
• bibtex / biber — required if the project has a bibliography

Installation

Either download the latest release, or if you have cargo installed you can run:

cargo install pdfdiff

How it works

1. Each source is resolved to a root .tex file (extracting git branches via git archive into a temp directory as needed).
2. The modified project is copied into the output directory so all relative asset paths work.
3. The modified source is pre-built (pdflatex + bibliography tool) to generate .bbl and other artifacts before the diff is compiled.
4. latexdiff produces diff.tex with change markup.
5. Colour overrides are injected just before \begin{document}: insertions are coloured, deletions get a strikethrough — \sout in text mode, \bcancel in math mode (since \sout does not work inside equation environments).
6. diff.tex is compiled twice with pdflatex to resolve cross-references.

arXiv projects

Projects that embed \input{main.bbl} instead of a live \bibliography{} call are handled automatically: a minimal .aux stub is written and bibtex is run to synthesise the missing .bbl before compilation.