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• • September 25, 2013 at 6:03 pm #65524
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    At Em Software we’ve come up with a quite sophisticated (if I say so myself, since I didn’t write the code ;-) document story content difference/merge engine for our DocsFlow and WordsFlow products.

    We’re thinking about building a standalone product that would take two InDesign documents, presumably related (one was edited independently of the other, or produced from scratch with mostly the same data) and produce a third which is the marked-up difference between the two. The “difference” document could be either marked up with normal InDesign change marks so you could explore differences with the Story Editor, or marked up with user-visible changes (e.g., underlines for insertions, and notes where deletions took place), and the resulting document could be automatically exported to PDF if that’s what you need.

    This application would need to script InDesign for some of these steps (and thus it would require an InDesign on the system where it runs), but that would be totally automated.

    This application would also compare only story content, not style/color/etc differences. (It could well be expanded to show the latter in some ways, or at least produce a report of any differences since some of them would be nearly impossible to show.)

    Would a product like this be of interest to the InDesign Secrets community?

    We could discuss it here, or you could email support@emsoftware.com if you really wanted to get into the nitty-gritty.

    Thanks!
    –Chris Ryland, President, Em Software

  • October 15, 2013 at 6:07 am #65798
    Matt Mayerchak

    Participant

    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?

  • October 15, 2013 at 7:23 am #65801
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    @Matt, thanks for the feedback!

    Yes, it would definitely mark up the differences in some visible fashion so you wouldn’t have to go hunting for them.

    And, yes, it’s probably a somewhat specialized tool for things like, e.g., financial markets where even the slightest difference in content can make or break things.

  • October 15, 2013 at 12:55 pm #65808
    Matt Mayerchak

    Participant

    If you need someone to test it, I’m happy to oblige.

  • October 16, 2013 at 8:17 am #65826
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    @Matt–Sure, can you send an email to support@emsoftware.com to make sure we don’t forget?

    Anyone else is welcome to help us test DocuDiffs.

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