Good to know you are still chewing this over. The sheer amount of bloat that collects in a Word document with tracked changes is an indication that Microsoft had a difficult time finding an elegant way of doing this too.
-----Original Message----- From: xmleditor-support-boun...@xmlmind.com [mailto:xmleditor-support-boun...@xmlmind.com] On Behalf Of Hussein Shafie Sent: Friday, June 26, 2015 2:28 AM To: Jeff Hooker Cc: 'xmleditor-support@xmlmind.com' Subject: Re: [XXE] Track changes On 06/26/2015 03:59 AM, Jeff Hooker wrote: > > Before you throw up your hands and say "We've been through this!", > please give me just a few lines to present an idea to you. > > I understand that you think Word-style track changes is unworkable in > XMLmind for a number of reasons. Ok, in truth I'm not all that fond of > Word-style change tracking either because of all the noise it adds to > the authoring window. > > However, your current "Compare Versions" feature already has all of > the features that I'd like to see in "Track Changes", except that it > needs two different versions of the document to work. If data that you > encoded in processing instructions at the bottom of the file segmented > the changes made **by session** The single processing instruction found at the bottom of an XML file where "Activate Change Detection" (http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/doc/help/changesMenu.html) has been activated stores just the serial numbers of the elements of the document. Therefore, implementing your idea is more complicated than you think. > then you'd be able to compare the document against other versions of > itself, and achieve a version of tracked changes that is actually more > flexible and useful than Word-style tracked changes could ever be. > > The fact that an author would need to pause to run a compare in order > to see what he'd done is, frankly, a detail. The feature would nicely > fill the differencing gap needed during active authoring. > > Just my opinion. > We share your opinion and had more or less the same idea. We would really like to make our "Compare Revisions" feature (http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/_distrib/doc/help/comparePane_primer.html) usable without the need of storing revisions in a document repository. The fact that you also estimate that this would make our "Compare Revisions" feature more useful encourages us to attempt implementing this idea. This being said, 1) we haven't found a simple and elegant way to implement it yet 2) this new implementation of the "Compare Revisions" feature is not yet at the top of our TODO list. (We would like to finish implementing DocBook 5.1 support -- http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/addons_doc.html#docbook51_config -- but this also depends on the work of the DocBook committee) -- XMLmind XML Editor Support List xmleditor-support@xmlmind.com http://www.xmlmind.com/mailman/listinfo/xmleditor-support -- XMLmind XML Editor Support List xmleditor-support@xmlmind.com http://www.xmlmind.com/mailman/listinfo/xmleditor-support
