Application requirement for Change Tracking: Document comparison

[Robin LaFontaine <robin.lafontaine@deltaxml.com>]

In preparation for Monday's call, here is a brief statement of requirements for our customers who need, for very good reasons, to know the differences between two documents and also to merge changes made to copies of one document.

Our application using ODF is in comparing documents, specifically ODT. The customer that originally sponsored this work was submitting large legal/financial documents to regulators and they required that every change to any text or table was shown in the result. (They did not require changes to format to be shown though we have had requests from others for this. But they did want to see changes to generated information such as table of content and list item numbers.)

As ODT 1.1 track change format was so limited, we had to do this using text decoration which had the limitation that changes could not be accepted/rejected, only viewed. Viewing the changes was, however, their main requirement for submission to regulators, so we managed to provide a solution for them despite limitations in ODT 1.1.

We were also asked to write a merge tool so that multiple lawyers could change different copies of the document at the same time and then the changes are merged together. Again, we were very limited due to the capabilities of the change tracking format in ODT 1.1. For this application to work properly, every change that an editor can make needs to be represented, i.e. any change to the document. This is essentially a non-real-time (batch) collaboration requirement. The importance of change tracking here is to enable accept/reject changes and to allow conflicting changes to be handled.

If ODT is to be useful for legal and legislative documents then it needs to be capable of tracking even minor changes - lawyers and regulators are very particular, for good reason.

Note: Due in part to the limitations of ODT 1.1 change tracking, our customer was forced to move away from ODF. If the change tracking had been better, the story might have been different.

Robin

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Robin La Fontaine, Director, DeltaXML Ltd  "Experts in information change"
T: +44 1684 592 144  E: robin.lafontaine@deltaxml.com      
http://www.deltaxml.com      
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