I've decided to start using a document revision system for my papers. My current ad hoc method is getting seriously strained; exchanging copies with collaborators, merging their comments with my revisions, preparing different versions for different places (archives, journals, home pages); it was all getting too confusing.

So I had a look around on the web and found a paper (also available as a wikibook) promoting the use of subversion. This is actually a software revision system. However, the general principle is the same: a typical LaTeX paper consists of several text files and this is exactly what a typical piece of software consists of and thus what software revision systems are designed to track.

There are several different systems around and it's not clear which is the "right" one. Subversion certainly seems better than CVS, but there's also GNU Arch and its variants. I had a quick play with subversion, but am going to give bazaar a serious go.

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This is a Perl script which does either a search (known in the Unix world as a grep) or a search-and-replace on a LaTeX document looking only in sections of mathematics.

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I find it useful to be able to switch the type of output LaTeX produces between PDF and postscript (once I get the hang of MathML then I might add that to this list). Most of the time this is purely a matter of using pdflatex instead of latex + dvips but with more complicated LaTeX documents then it is sometimes a little more involved. This is particularly the case where external graphics files are involved.

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UPDATE 2008/01/14: Fink and Epsfig