Reply To: Would an InDesign document content comparison utility be useful?

Chris,

I would try to set up my workflow so that I would never need such a thing. Even so, I can think of a few real-world examples of where it would be useful:

For instance, I’ve worked on financial reports for mutual funds where you have 15 different 2-page documents and they all have the same “disclosures” i.e. legal copy on the sides and bottom, but the main body is different for each. So, could you run this script to see if the legal copy has been updated to match all of them?

Conversely, we have run into problems where we wanted the legal copy to be different – but only in a specific place – and make sure it wasn’t just copied from one doc to another by the production artist. So we might want to run the script and make sure it finds the different fund names in the legal copy for each. It would be nice to have it highlight just the parts that were different, so you don’t have to read through 4 paragraphs of 6-point type to try to find the 3 words that are supposed to be different in each, and make sure the rest of it was the same.

Would it work this way?