Well, there is a huge gap between determining the differences between two different sets of XML (particularly in DITA), and simple tracked changes, and that is even if we ignore the fact that generating XML marked up with differencing information and generating output that reflects the differences as accurately as possible are two very, very different tasks.
We use DeltaXML DITA Diff to programmatically compare different sets of XML and mark up the individual files with DITA-compliant change tracking markup; that is NOT the task we would use Track Changes for in XMLmind. We use DeltaXML when we want to generate comprehensive diff’d documents for development teams and customers, and often the document sets run into thousands of pages and have had dozens of engineers touching them, so there’s no way we’re doing this by hand. In-editor track changes are just a way of allowing an author to keep track of the changes made in the current editing session, or in the last few editing sessions; it is author-to-author communication, rather than anything applicable to generating differenced documents. When an engineer enters a topic containing a 1000 row table with a dozen pervasive changes s/he needs to make, it’s very useful to be able to quickly see what you’ve already done when dealing with the inevitable interruptions of the workday. That is the application I see for tracked changes in XMLmind, rather than serving in any way as the basis for differenced output. Jeff. From: n...@kbss27.be [mailto:n...@kbss27.be] Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2015 12:13 AM To: Jeff Hooker Cc: 'xmleditor-support@xmlmind.com' Subject: Re: [XXE] Track changes As for track changes in general, I've concluded over the years that simply turning it on in the hope that the software (any software) will produce usable results … doesn't work :-} I prefer to make sure changes are large enough to comprehend, and then mark them by hand with FM conditions or – when I'm slumming it – Word styles. For heavy reviewing, I'll even present before and after in a two-column table; the ease of review makes up for the extra work. My real requirement for tracking changes in XXE, as I mentioned before, is to be able to use the DITA status attribute to drive output formatting: to highlight differences in a new version of a publication, I want to be able to say (for instance) "any content tagged with status='new' is output in green". As far as I remember, this wasn't possible out of the box last time I asked; I'd have to roll up my sleeves and tussle with xslt. * is this still the case? * is there any chance colour-coding based on attribute values might be built in in a future version of XXE? On 26 June 2015, Jeff Hooker <jeff.hoo...@pmcs.com<mailto:jeff.hoo...@pmcs.com>> wrote: 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> [mailto: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<mailto:'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<mailto:xmleditor-support@xmlmind.com> http://www.xmlmind.com/mailman/listinfo/xmleditor-support -- XMLmind XML Editor Support List xmleditor-support@xmlmind.com<mailto:xmleditor-support@xmlmind.com> http://www.xmlmind.com/mailman/listinfo/xmleditor-support
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