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Text Highlighting in Latex

While preparing a manuscript with Latex, it is often useful to highlight the changes made in the current revision with a different color. This can be achieved using the \textcolor command provided by Latex. For example, \textcolor{red}{Hello World} would display the string "Hello World" in red color.

However, the final/published copy of the manuscript does not contain any highlighted text. Therefore, if a large volume of changes were made, it becomes tiresome at the end to find and remove all the individual portions of highlighted text.

This can be circumvented by defining a utility command to switch highlighting on and off as desired. In the following, we define a new Latex command, highlighttext, for this purpose. The command takes only a single argument—the text to be highlighted.

    \usepackage{color}

  % For highlighting changes in this version with red color
  \newcommand{\highlighttext}[1] {\textcolor{red}{#1}}
  % Remove all text highlighting

  % Useful to generate the final version of the PDF
  %\newcommand{\highlighttext}[1] {#1}



In particular, the line

\newcommand{\highlighttext}[1] {\textcolor{red}{#1}}
indicates that when highlighttext is called with an argument, it will change the color of the argument (text) to red. Moreover, if we wish to change the highlight color from red to say, yellow, we only need to change the above line.

When review of the manuscript is over or, in general, when you do not require the highlighted text any more, simply comment out the above line, and uncomment the following:

\newcommand{\highlighttext}[1] {#1}

This version of the command signifies that whenever highlighttext is called with an argument, the argument (text) is returned as it is—no processing (e.g., coloring) over it is done. Note that only one of these two command definitions should be enabled at any given time—the other should be commented out.

What do you think of this technique? Did the pair of commands make text highlighting easier for you? Or do you use any better approach? Let the world know in the comments!

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