Comparing two drafts of a LaTeX paper without losing your mind
At some point in every paper's life, someone sends back a revised version as a separate file instead of using version control, and now you have paper_v3.tex and paper_v3_reviewer_comments.tex and no clean way to see what actually changed between them beyond opening both side by side and squinting.
latexdiff exists and works, but it needs to be installed, run from a terminal, and configured correctly to not choke on your specific package setup — which is more friction than it sounds like when you just want to answer "did they change the results section or just fix typos" in the next two minutes.
For a quick gut-check — not a full compiled diff PDF, just "what's actually different here" — pasting both versions into a plain text-diff tool gets you there faster. DiffChecker does a line-by-line comparison and highlights word-level changes within a modified line, so you're not stuck figuring out whether an entire paragraph changed or just one number in it.
It's not a replacement for latexdiff when you need an actual tracked-changes PDF for a co-author or a resubmission. It's the thing you reach for when you just need to know, right now, what changed.
If the version you're comparing is headed back out the door as a resubmission, the pre-submission checklist covers what to re-check once you know what moved.