Other

Finally, it is worth noting that some word processors, such as OpenOffice.org Writer and Microsoft Word, have three relevant features: document comparison, change tracking, and versions.

Document Comparison

Document Comparison allows you to compare documents when their native file format makes use of other diff tools difficult. You would use this when you have two copies of a document that didn’t have change tracking turned on, or when you need to merge feedback from various sources.

While it is trivial to unzip the content.xml file from a given OpenDoc file, the result has no line breaks and is not terribly pretty or readable. See Comparing Two Documents for a bash script that will do this low-level kind of difference.

Refer to the table below for information on how to access the built-in GUI comparison function, which is much easier than trying to do it manually.

Change Tracking and Versions

The change-tracking feature saves information about changes made to a document. Review mode uses various copyediting markup on the screen to display who did what, when. This is obviously useful for all kinds of creation and editing purposes, but please read our warnings.

The versions feature allows you to save more than one version of a document in a single file. This can be handy in all sorts of odd ways. For example, we’ve seen router configurations copied and pasted from a terminal into different versions inside the same document for archival and change control purposes.

Warning

The change tracking and versions features will cause your document to continually grow in size, since items that are changed are still kept and deleted items are not really deleted, but only marked as deleted.

If accidentally turned on, change tracking and versions can be very dangerous information leaks! For example, if you send similar proposals to competing companies after doing a search and replace and other editing, someone at one of those companies can see exactly what you changed and when you changed it. The most recent versions of these tools have various methods that attempt to warn you or clear private information before a given document is converted to PDF or emailed.

Take a look at any word processor attachments you receive in email, especially from vendors. You may be surprised.

Accessing These Features

Table D-1. Word processor functions

Feature

Writer menu option

Word menu option

Document comparisons

Edit → Compare Document

Tools → Compare and Merge Documents

Change tracking

Edit → Changes

Tools → Track Changes

Versions

File → Versions

File → Versions

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
3.133.134.151