conditional highlighting with soul

Question

The journal PLoS ONE, says in the FAQ

When submitting your revision, you will need to include the following new files:
[...] A ‘clean’ copy of your revised manuscript.
A revised manuscript with tracked changes. [...]

I'm using soul's \hl to highlight changes. So, I also need a version that doesn't highlight changes. To accomplish this, I added the following code. The \renewcommand{\hl}[1]{#1} is intended as a no-op. So the "clean" version would use \highlightfalse and the version with tracked changes would use \highlighttrue.

This appears to work, but I'm wondering if there are any problems with this approach, or better ways to do it.

\newif\ifhighlight
% COMMENT OUT \highlighttrue or \highlightfalse
\highlighttrue % or
%\highlightfalse
\ifhighlight
\else
\renewcommand{\hl}[1]{#1}
\fi

Answer 1

If you do want to use highlighting with soul, then this approach seems fine to me. Even better would be to create a sematic macro, like

\ifhighlight
    \let\change\hl
\else
    \newcommand{\change}[1]{#1}
\fi

Depending on how you compile your file, Passing parameters to a document (or any of its near-duplicates) could be of interest.

Since the trickery soul has to do can cause trouble, it might be worth to have a look packages that are explicitly designed for your application, like the changes package.