Creating a compare from one book to another

[jopakent]

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