We are submitting the review “Twenty Years After: Scaling Relations in Oxygen Electrocatalysis and Beyond“

I have made so many changes to the LaTeX code that latexdiff gives 99+ errors. UPDATE: the errors were related to table and equations. To fix them I played with –math-markup=none and –add-to-config PICTURENEV=tabular, but eventually just fixed the Tables and specific errors.

There are two ways to get diff in overleaf, which I use.

In search for an alternative, have tested DiffPDF and Meld. The result looks useful, yet unsuitable for submitting them to the editor. So, this post should have a label “do not know how” instead of usual “know-how”. Still, fun.

To make the last printscreen, I did the following.

Installed packages in Linux/Ubuntu/WSL2.

sudo apt-get -y install meld calibre parallel

Saved the following code in a file named “diffdoc” (with no extensions) inside directory “/usr/local/bin”.

usage="
*** usage:

diffepub - compare text in two files. Valid format for input files are:
MOBI, LIT, PRC, EPUB, ODT, HTML, CBR, CBZ, RTF, TXT, PDF and LRS.

diffepub -h | FILE1 FILE2

-h print this message

Example:
diffepub my_file1.pdf my_file2.pdf
diffepub my_file1.epub my_file2.epub

v0.2 (added parallel and 3 files processing)
"

#parse command line options
while getopts "h" OPTIONS ; do
  case ${OPTIONS} in
    h|-help) echo "${usage}"; exit;;
  esac
done
shift $(($OPTIND - 1))

#check if first 2 command line arguments are files
if [ -z "$1" ] || [ -z "$2" ] || [ ! -f "$1" ] || [ ! -f "$2" ]
then
  echo "ERROR: input files do not exist."
  echo
  echo "$usage"
  exit
fi



#create temporary files (first & last 10 characters of
# input files w/o extension)
file1=`basename "$1" | sed -r -e '
s/\..*$//                     #strip file extension
s/(^.{1,10}).*(.{10})/\1__\2/ #take first-last 10 chars
s/$/_XXX.txt/                 #add tmp file extension
'`
TMPFILE1=$(mktemp --tmpdir "$file1")

file2=`basename "$2" | sed -r -e '
s/\..*$//                     #strip file extension
s/(^.{1,10}).*(.{10})/\1__\2/ #take first-last 10 chars
s/$/_XXX.txt/                 #add tmp file extension
'`
TMPFILE2=$(mktemp --tmpdir "$file2")

if [ "$#" -gt 2 ] 
then
  file3=`basename "$3" | sed -r -e '
  s/\..*$//                     #strip file extension
  s/(^.{1,10}).*(.{10})/\1__\2/ #take first-last 10 chars
  s/$/_XXX.txt/                 #add tmp file extension
  '`
  TMPFILE3=$(mktemp --tmpdir "$file3")
fi

#convert to txt and compare using meld
doit(){ #to solve __space__ between filenames and parallel
  ebook-convert $1
}
export -f doit
if [ "$#" -gt 2 ] 
then
  (parallel doit ::: "$1 $TMPFILE1" \
                     "$2 $TMPFILE2" \
                     "$3 $TMPFILE3" ) &&
  (meld "$TMPFILE1" "$TMPFILE2" "$TMPFILE3")
else
  (parallel doit ::: "$1 $TMPFILE1" \
                     "$2 $TMPFILE2" ) &&
  (meld "$TMPFILE1" "$TMPFILE2")
fi

Made sure the owner is me and it has execution permissions:

sudo chown $USER:$USER /usr/local/bin/diffepub
sudo chmod 700 /usr/local/bin/diffepub

Run it on two pdf files:

diffdoc FILE1.pdf FILE2.pdf