Tracked Changes in HTML Output
Our department has to output several large policy manuals (5k to 10k pages) each month for an internal audience of several thousand users. One of our requirements is that each month's changes should be visible to the users. So deleted text is shown as strike through and new text is colored. Whether it's optimal or advisable is irrelevant—suffice it to say that changing the requirement is an impossibility.
We'd like to use tracked changes to satisfy the requirement, but these manuals are published and then archived on an internal website that includes 10+ years of materials. We publish using Frame 2017's Responsive HTML option, and it doesn't seem to want to show the markup. It will show the deleted and added text, but no color or strike through. We've been forced to use character tagging to indicate changes, but, as you can imagine, with 5k to 10k page manuals and sometimes thousands of changes per month, it's incredibly inefficient and inconvenient to first make and tag the changes, but even more so to remove the tagging. Our method, which is the only one we've been able to come up, is to select the text through to its paragraph marker, click Default Format, and then reapply the Paragraph tag. If there is a single word tagged within a sentence, the format will change with Default font, but not if the whole paragraph is selected. In addition, we can't simply select the entire text flow/file contents and use Default Font, because all of the selected text will pick up the tagging of the first paragraph in the file/flow. That means going line by line unless paragraphs happen to have the same tag.
Is there a way, even if it involves using extendscript or some deep, technical solution, to publish to HTML and preserve the formatting of tracked changes? If not, is there some way to make character tagging more efficient? In particular, is there a way to remove character tags more efficiently? Any help or thoughts would be appreciated.
