Best practice for maintaining change history in tex

Question

Whenever I write a collaborative document, it undergoes a lot of draft changes. Apart from maintaining the change history in svn, how can I maintain the change history in the tex document itself? I also want it to reflect on the generated pdf.

Answer 1

I Use package rcs and put

\usepackage{rcs}

in the preamble. Then, lines such as:

\RCS $Id:$
\RCS $Source:$
\pagestyle{myheadings}
\markright{\RCSId}

put version information in the formated document.

I notice that there is also a package rcsinfo with a similar purpose, but have not used it.

Answer 2

I have previously used the svninfo Herbert already mentioned.

But I recently found the vc bundle. It has the advantage/difference of not only tracking the included .tex files but any file in the directory. You will get the global revision, including images or .bib files as well. Apart from svn it supports bzr and git.

On the other hand, it is an external shell-script and not a LaTeX package. Also you will only get the global revision number, not a more fine-grained result depending on current file etc. as svninfo provides.

Supplement: Since it does not use svn properties and special lines in the TeX file, it is completely independent from the svninfo approach and you can even combine both variants.

Answer 3

If you want a revision history table showing the following four items, you should look at the vhistory package.

• Version
• Date
• Authors
• Summary of the changes

If you're wanting the exact revision history from SVN, this might not be the package for you, as this revision history table is created in the LaTeX document. I find this advantageous since I want a more succinct revision history table than every little check-in to git.

Example vhistory code

\usepackage{vhistory}
\begin{document}
% Start of the revision history table
\begin{versionhistory}
  \vhEntry{1.0}{22.01.04}{JPW|KW}{created}
  \vhEntry{1.1}{23.01.04}{DP|JPW}{correction}
  \vhEntry{1.2}{03.02.04}{DP|JPW}{revised after review}
\end{versionhistory}

Use the tablegrid option if you want to "display a grid in the table representing the revision history."

Example vhistory output