I recently used latexdiff during the paper shepherding process. I found it very useful for highlighting changes between different papers versions (basically the submission version and the revised version shared to the shepherd).

Here’s a thorough tutorial on latexdiff: https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Articles/Using_Latexdiff_For_Marking_Changes_To_Tex_Documents.

I only have one more thing to add. If you have multiple tex files for your paper, before calling latexdiff you need to run latexpand on your master tex (say paper_master.tex).

$ cd paper_dir # latexpand doesn't work outside your paper folder
$ latexpand paper_master.tex > paper_expanded.tex

Once you have paper_old_expanded.tex and paper_new_expanded.tex, you need to run

$ latexdiff paper_old_expanded.tex paper_new_expanded > paper_diff.tex

Then you can compile paper_diff.tex the same way of compiling paper_master.tex. This means paper.diff requires the same resources, such as embedded source code files, figures, etc.

Tips

If you cannot compile paper_diff.tex, try the following solutions (and cross your fingers).

  1. Using xelatex instead of latex or pdflatex. I don’t know why but it appears to me that xelatex is more robust.
  2. Replacing the default latexdiff preamble with these lines.