RE: [office-collab] Change tracking on/off

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

That's no urban legend.  

OpenOffice-lineage Writer and Microsoft Word all allow change-tracking to be toggled on and off without problems.  (Toggling in Calc is destructive of the already-tracked changes.  I don't know if that is the case for Excel.)  In ODF Text documents, the <text:tracked-changes> text:track-changes setting is carried into the persistent document.

I have edited documents where change-tracking was toggled off and then back on so I could correct something the software did that was not something that needed to be tracked.  I have done this, for example, when producing change-tracked documents that reflect the application of Errata.  If I add Editorial Notes to a document, I don't add them as tracked changes.  With OpenOffice-lineage software I have to toggle sometimes because change-tracking gets something wrong (such as making unintended font changes or treating fonts as changed when they aren't, etc.)  I also do it to handle changes to the embedded schema to ensure that the line-numbering is adjusted properly.

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice have a feature (going back at least to OpenOffice.org 3.4-dev) by which one can protect the change-tracking setting.  That is, it cannot be toggled without a password.  This is handled in settings.xml, along with the provision to protect a complete document as read-only.  The feature is on the Writer File | Properties | Security (bad name!) tab.

But, by default, there is no such protection for ODF Text documents.

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: office-collab@lists.oasis-open.org [mailto:office-collab@lists.oasis-open.org] On Behalf Of Svante Schubert
Sent: Sunday, September 30, 2012 05:20
To: office-collab@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [office-collab] Change tracking on/off

If I have a business document - as a contract - and sent the document to
my business partner, I would like to know what was changed. No turning
on/off of changes is desired.
There is no change-tracking on/off for change-tracking systems for
source code, either. To me it is a urban story of an user feature.
I am traveling and will answer on Tuesday.

Best regards,
Svante

On 30.09.2012 02:03, Andreas J. Guelzow wrote:
> I am somewhat confused about the issue of turning change tracking
> on/off. What happens in the following case:
>
> Consider a document with title "The Colour Purple"
> change tracking on
> change "Purple" to "Orange"
> change tracking off
> change "Orange" to "Pink"
> save the file
>
> Now the final form of the file contains "The Colour Pink"
> Which change tracking information do we expect to be stored in the file?
>
> Andreas


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