improving the track changes experience in rmarkdown 📝

[njtierney]

I'd like to make it as easy as possible to track changes from one rmarkdown document as possible, whether it be in HTML, PDF, or even Word (although this might be complex).

I wrote a tweet about this here and had some really great responses from people.

There were two packages that stood out,

• latexdiffr by @hughjonesd
• trackmd by @sctyner

So I was thinking that we could try and flesh out example use of these packages, perhaps creating a vignette, a separate package, if we think that will mean we can do more, and perhaps incorporate some of the nice links people linked:

• Some nice make magic with latexdiff
• How to compare two microsoft word documents
• markdown diff
• dubdiff
• A really nice blog post by Timothée Poisot

[hughjonesd]

Sounds great. Tell me if I can help! latexdiffr is just a quick hack, it could use some polish.

[RPanczak]

Perhaps backyard package 📦 could be of some help here, at least when working with bookdown? 📖

[kcf-jackson]

The diffobj package may also be relevant.

[njtierney]

Hi @hughjonesd - thanks! You have laid the foundation down very well for latexdiffr! I tried out using latexdiffr::git_latexdiff() and couldn't quite get it to compile, but I think that was partly to do with LaTeX installation issues with tlmgr.

Here are some of my thoughts on improving the process of diffing.

• Make it output agnostic. So you can produce diff'd HTML, PDF, and Word. (perhaps using dubdiff and somehow talking to microsoft word via command line?)
• Have a usethis style console questions that confirm the files you want to check out, from which dates and times
• Ask if you want to move them to a new folder
• also do a shallow check for dependencies etc (if you move the file from one checkout into another folder you will need to reconsider reconstructing filepaths - this is a difficult problem).

We might import/borrow some of the parts for generating diffs with LaTeX from latexdiffr - would that be OK?

[hughjonesd]

That’s fine by me.

Moving a Rmd document and hoping to capture and move its dependencies is going to be hard; that can include arbitrary files, read in arbitrary ways.

Limiting to the git version case might be more manageable: you can checkout the whole repository at the old version, into some separate location. (Not what latexdiffr does now, but possible.)

[januz]

Is anybody working on this? I would love a unified way to track changes in Rmarkdown with different output options (mostly HTML and LaTeX). A unified approach to commenting on text would be great as well for collaborative writing.