Maybe people keep telling you Word is great but you are just too emotionally attached to LaTeX to consider using anything else. It just looks so beautiful. Besides, you would have to leave your beloved linux environment (maybe that’s just me), so you stick with what you know. You work for many weeks long and hard, finally producing a draft of a paper that gets the all clear from your supervisor to submit to journal X. Eventually you hear back and the reviewers have responded with some good ideas and a few pedantic points. Apparently this time the journal wants a tracked changes version to go with your revised manuscript.

Highlighting every change sounds like a lot of bother, and besides, you’d have to process the highlighted version to generate the clean version they want you to submit alongside it. There must be a better way, and one that doesn’t involve converting your document to Word.

Thankfully, the internet has an answer! Check out this little package changes which will do just what you need. As long as you annotate using \deleted{}, \replaced{} and \added{} along the way, you will have to change just one word of your tex source file in order to produce the highlighted and final versions. It even comes with a handy bash script to get rid of the resulting mess when you’re happy with the result, leaving you with a clean final tex source file.

The die-hard Word fans won’t be impressed, but you will be very satisfied that you have found a nice little solution that does just the job you want it to. It’s actually capable of much more, including comments by multiple authors, customisation of colours and styles, and an automatically generated summary of changes. I have heard good things about ShareLaTeX for collaboration, but this simple package will get you a long way if you are not keen to start paying money yet.