Compare Documents -- with Tables

[Outlaw, Cathy]

I've used Beyond Compare before. It identifies textual changes reliably, but it only creates a text document. I need to have all changes contained in one file, with formatting, the way reviewers are expecting to see it.

The two-phase comparison you suggest would not do this. I could use Beyond Compare for myself to identify the changes in the tables, but I would still be stuck with manually marking the conditions in the combined FM document for the reviewers, the tedious chore I'm looking to eliminate.

- Cathy

From: Baruch Brodersen [mailto:baruch at technitext.com]
Sent: Friday, January 28, 2011 3:02 AM
To: Outlaw, Cathy
Cc: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Compare Documents -- with Tables

Hi Cathy,
I did a quick test, and I see what you mean. FM's native document compare function in 9.0 is not very robust when it comes to structural changes in tables.
Possible solution:
If you save your docs as PDFs, you can compare those side-by-side in Beyond Compare http://www.scootersoftware.com/download.php as rendered text files. Beyond Compare will show you text and column changes but not formating changes.

For that you can use Acrobat. Acrobat 9's compare feature will show formatting changes, but the column and text changes are hard, at least for my eye, to intuitively grasp.

A two-phase comparison then, should enable you to visually capture the differences:
1. PDF comaprisons in Beyond Compare for text, cell, and column changes.
2. PDF comparisons in Acrobat for formatting.

Alternatively, if you don't need to *see* the changes, you can *read* them by saving the the files as XML, and then doing a side-by-side comparison in Beyond Compare. In my tests, that worked pretty well.

Best,
Baruch Brodersen
Technitext Documentation

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 1:28 AM, Outlaw, Cathy <cathy_outlaw at baxter.com<mailto:cathy_outlaw at baxter.com>> wrote:
We have to create a "redline" that compares a new version of a document to a previous version of the document, for each draft revision.

The FrameMaker 9 Compare Documents utility works great for basic text. However, our documents are full of tables. Many, many very long tables.

With FM's Compare Documents utility, if a table structure changes (a row is added/deleted, a column is added/deleted, the anchor is moved, or any cell formatting is changed) then FM simply inserts both the old table and new table in the comparison document. The only conditional tracking it does is to put a change bar next to the old and new table anchors, and only the anchors take on the conditional color (i.e., red for deleted or blue for inserted).

In the comparison document, the two tables look like regular text - no conditions are applied. We have to MANUALLY color-code the insertions and deletions within all of the tables. This can take days, literally. There has GOT to be a better way!

So my request is: is there any way to automatically identify the changes within tables in FrameMaker, or with any application that would partner with FrameMaker? (Acrobat doesn't compare tables very well either, nor does Word.) I can't find enough information about FrameMaker 10 to know if they have addressed the Compare Documents feature with tables.

Any direction on this topic would be greatly appreciated!

Cathy Outlaw
Technical Communicator




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