Track Changes In Frame

[Art Campbell]

It depends a bit on what you want... if you want to see changes from
one final version to another final version, or to track changes during
a or several edit cycles.

Seeing changes between two files isn't hard to do. All versions have a
useful "compare" facility that shows the differences between two
different files, but that only works with a pair of files.

If you're talking about tracking changes and being able to decide on
whether to accept or reject an edit during the development cycle, and
you're talking about FM 8, I don't think there are any plugins that
perform as well as the native Track Changes tools that were introduced
in 8. Earlier versions attracted some plugins, but I don't think any
of them really delivered full and bullet-proof functionality. But
these only track pending changes. Once you accept or discard a logged
change, the record of that change and action disappears because it's
incorporated into the working text. There's no "ghost" image that goes
with the file.

To see what changed after each Track Changes edit cycle is completed
and edits have been rolled in, change bars would be in place. But to
do a line-by-line, you'd need to compare the output of the file at
that point (a snapshot or checkpoint) to your baseline.

So to fully track incremental changes, you'd need to save daily or
weekly versions (or use source control) of changing files so you can
show an audit trail of incremental changes as the documents evolve and
different cycles of Track Change text is incorporated. And if you want
to track evolving changes over multiple edit cycles, you need to
compare the baseline file with any single incremental checkpoint file.

Art

Art Campbell
               art.campbell at gmail.com
  "... In my opinion, there's nothing in this world beats a '52
Vincent and a redheaded girl." -- Richard Thompson
                                                      No disclaimers apply.
                                                               DoD 358



On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 5:10 PM, Joseph <panopticon23 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I work for a US company that was recently acquired by a Japanese company.
> The Japanese headquarters wants a detailed record of all changes that
> occurred between different versions of the documentation. For example, if
> v.6 of software X is being released, they would want to know all the changes
> made to the documentation between v.5 and v.6. I know that Frame has change
> bars and track text edits but I was wondering if there any third-party
> software or Frame plugins that anyone would recommend for this.
>
> --
> Sincerely,
>
> Joseph Lorenzini
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