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mandrill22
mandrill22
Inspiring
September 29, 2010
Question

Compare doc options

  • September 29, 2010
  • 1 reply
  • 469 views

While comparing two document revisions, I found that the compare algorithm will flag seemingly identical text as being changed. The difference was forced returns, spaces and punctuation changes (addition of commas, conversion of commas to semicolons etc.). I can live with the punctuation changes, since they are important, but when it came to comparing the text, I just wanted to know what had been deleted and what had been added.

Does anyone know how to get around this in an elegant manner (I wound up removing all hard returns and double spaces using find and replace and comparing a chunk 'o text with another). Is there a way to make the compare documents process overlook forced returns and added spaces?

Nadeem

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    1 reply

    Michael_Müller-Hillebrand
    Michael_Müller-Hillebrand
    Legend
    September 29, 2010

    Nadeem,

    Apparently the doc compare gave you what you asked for. Added commas are added text and may be significant as well.

    What FrameMaker version are you using?

    I guess FrameMaker 8 introduced the Change Tracking feature; the marking of new and deleted text is done the same way as the doc compare feature handles this. So you can use the Change Tracking palette (toolbar) to jump from change to change and with the click on a button accept all changes that you don’t want to show to your readers.

    - Michael

    mandrill22
    mandrill22Author
    Inspiring
    September 29, 2010

    Hello Michael,

    Thanks for your response. I am using FM 8; the documents I had to compare were probably authored in Word and I got them in PDF format. After giving up on Acrobat's comparison features to give me what I wanted (i.e. textual differences) I imported the texts to FM 8 files where I did the side by side comparisons. I was just hoping that I could find a way to ignore changes limited to forced returns, case changes, spaces and other changes that in most cases would not be considered a change in the text but purely formatting changes. I agree that a comma in the wrong (or right) place can completely change the intent of a sentence. Maybe an item for the wish list.

    Nadeem

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