Creating a compare from one book to another

[Philip Sharman]

Hi Paul,
   Sadly, I don't know of a faster way to compare two books  But it does
sound as though you don't need to fix the cross-references.  If they aren't
going to actually be used, who cares if they are broken?  The new book is
only being used to compare old and new, so I would leave them as they are.
   Cheers,
      Philip.

On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 9:47 AM, jopakent <jopakent at comcast.net> wrote:

> I've done this a bunch of times in years past, and it occurs to me that
> mebbee I'm making this harder than it has to be.
>
> Using FM7.2 on Win XP, I need to create a PDF that indicates all insertions
> and deletions between the current draft and the released version of a
> manual. It has about 20 chapters and a dozen or so appendices, and a pretty
> fair number of illustrations.
>
> What I've been doing is opening up the old book and the new book and then
> using the file compare utility. That produces a slew of "CMP" files (for
> example Intro.fm produces IntroCMP.fm).
>
> Once I've created the CMP files I, move them to another directory that I've
> set up to mirror the structure of the existing book. Nothing too intricate,
> just a text folder and an image folder.
>
> The resulting book seems to work pretty well for producing a PDF. Before I
> produce the PDF, I generally look through and examine each of the
> insertions
> and deletions for "validity." It seems like a fair number of what FM
> detects
> as changes aren't really changes, maybe a file name changed, or maybe it's
> moved location by a paragraph, or I dunno, sometimes it seems pretty
> random.
> At any rate, I remove the formatting form the changes that aren't really
> changes.
>
>
> So, for the questions.
>
> Because I've got a new book formed from files with different names from the
> old book, all of the cross references are broken. This brings up a couple
> questions:
>
> 1st, is there a simple tweak I could make to my workflow that would keep
> all
> of the x-refs from breaking?
>
> 2nd, does it matter if the x-refs are broken (see explanation below)?
>
> 3rd, if it does matter, what's the best way to fix them? I've been using
> search to find them, and then clicking away until I've repaired each one.
>
> I got through chapters the other night and then stopped to think about it a
> bit. Seems way too labor intensive doing it by hand. I'm guessing that I
> could probably save all the files to MIF and then do some search and
> replaces to speed up the process.
>
> I'm wondering if it's even necessary to fix the broken x-refs. All of the
> broken cross references still display properly. I know if I made
> substantive
> changes, they wouldn't be indicated properly, but the purpose of this book
> is not to move forward and be released. It's just created so that reviewers
> can be pointed to what's new in the current revision. I'll be making any
> changes to the actual manual. Am I missing something important here?
>
> Thanks in advance for those with the patience to offer insights.
>
> J. Paul Kent
>
> 206-383-0539
>
>
>