Slightly OT: tracking using LaTeX

[Deron Meranda]

> > On Sun, 2005-02-06 at 08:49 -0800, Globe Trotter wrote:
> > > does anyone know if there is a program which can track changes
> > > in a document in LaTeX?

There are two separate tasks you're talking about (which Word
probably lumps together into one so you don't know they're
different).

1. Recording change history and revisions.
2. Marking the "rendered" document in a way to indicate what
    changed between one revision and another.

For (1), any change control system will work well, since LaTeX is
a text-based format.  For Fedora, there are three packages which
do this:
  * rcs
  * cvs
  * subversion
If you're new to the whole thing and have no prior preference it
might be best to learn and use subversion.  See
http://subversion.tigris.org/ for the Subversion homepage, and
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/ for a free online edition of the
O'Reilly book on Subversion.

For (2), there is a LaTeX add-on called "chagebar" which might
do what you want.  See http://www.astro.uu.nl/tex/tetex/latex/changebar/
(or any number of mirrors).  I believe this is the same thing as
what's located under the directory
/usr/share/latex2html/docs/changebar/ in FC3, which is part of
the tetex-latex RPM package.

-- 
Deron Meranda