Useful LaTeX Tools

LaTeX is a great typeset software in writing academic papers.

Here I give out some useful tools bundled with LaTex (details can be found via man in Linux/Unix systems).

latexmk – generate LaTeX document

latexmk -c Clean up (remove) all regeneratable files generated by latex and bibtex or biber except dvi, postscript and pdf.

latexdiff – determine and markup differences between two latex files

A typical usage of latexdiff is
latexdiff old.tex new.tex > diff.tex
Before running the command, do not forget to run bibtex to generate bbl files if you use bibtex. If you have multiple files with main.tex files, you can run the following command,
latexdiff --append-safecmd=subfile v1/main.tex v2/main.tex --flatten > diff.tex
Finally, you can typeset diff.tex and see the differences. This functionality is extremely useful if you work with others.