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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