how to get change bars in PDF output for review?

[MarkoSchuetz]

Description

Is there a recommended way to get change bars with respect to an earlier version to help with review. For example, a project tags a version 1.8 and then makes changes that then get tagged as version 1.8.1. Now, I want to generate a PDF from version 1.8.1, but specifying the version tag 1.8 as the reference for changes. The resulting PDF should have all the changes highlighted for easier review.

[mcanouil]

@MarkoSchuetz I notice that your question is about "change bars" (whatever that is) in PDF outputs, but I'm afraid there isn't enough context for anyone to properly assist you. Could you please clarify:

• Which software or system you're currently using?
• What type of document you're working with?
• How this relates to Quarto CLI (if at all)?

At present, your query doesn't appear to be directly or indirectly related to Quarto CLI. If you could provide more details, we'd be better positioned to help or direct you to the appropriate resource.

[gordonwoodhull]

Presumably this kind of thing:

https://help.adobe.com/en_US/framemaker/using/using-framemaker/user-guide/frm_reviewandcollaborate_re-change-bars.html

I don't know of any Quarto feature or extension which supports this, sorry. Diffing Markdown to find changes between two versions is an interesting problem, but a hard one.

[mcanouil]

It needs to be supported by LaTeX/Typst.
And even there, I highly doubt you could really make meaningful "change bar" from the computed to the end result PDF.

That said, there are tools such as PanDiff but I don't know how they would behave on Quarto output.
Even that tool does not (and more likely cannot) use the "change bar".

[MarkoSchuetz]

I'm considering requiring students in software engineering courses to use a docs-as-code approach for their project documentation. Currently, there are no requirements on how to write that documentation. Many projects just use Google Docs.

The documentation they write must (also) be rendered as PDF. This documentation goes through several milestones and gets feedback upon each. In this scenario, I want the changes from the last milestone to the current to be marked in order to focus review on those parts.

I have (personally) used LaTeX in the past with https://ctan.org/pkg/changebar. And it does not really have to be that precise way of highlighting... That PanDiff suggestion looks promising.

I was hoping that someone here in their write, submit, get feedback, revise, re-submit workflow might have had the need to highlight changes between versions of the documentation and that I could benefit from that prior work.