Well, I’ve about exhausted my little brain thinking of different terms to use to search for what I’m looking for, and I can’t seem to find the feature in the program or searching help, but I was wondering if it even exists…
I’d like to have the feature that I see in microsoft word to compare documents. I know that I can do this in terminal with diff, etc, but the output is not desirable when using rtf files. At least for me, it gets confusing that way.
I know there are commercial comparison products out there (deltapro, etc) but those are a bit overkill in my mind, but useful for some circumstances.
diff works on plain text, but it begins to fall apart on rtf and any other format, but diff isn’t the nice blue and red text I’m accustomed to seeing, either, so it’s not really a good solution.
Is there any facility for this? If not has anybody already tackled a script for it?
I couldn’t seem to find any discussion even about the feature, even though it seems like it’d be a feature already here. If it doesn’t, I’d love to see this feature added (compare two documents, and produce a marked up new document that shows insertions and deletions between the old and new version)
The file comparison tool you’re looking for in DT doesn’t exist there.
One free alternative is FileMerge, which is included in the Apple developer tools (developer.apple.com – it’s a hassle to get yourself setup the first time, but there are some good utilities included in addition to FileMerge). No blue and red text in FileMerge though. If you have Word, why not open the RTFs in Word and use that?
Filemerge works in a pinch, have used it in a pinch. Textwrangler can do it on plain text, too. for that matter, I can diff it in emacs or vim. but why? none of those make the inline redline. None of those are good for moving text and showing changes on one doc. They are good for what they were made to do, but not for what I’m looking for.
I don’t want to upgrade Word, and would be happy as a lark if I could delete Office X from my Mac entirely.
I use compare on Word at Work.
I realized where I imagined that I saw it as a feature. Scriv 2.0 is adding it as a feature to compare snapshots.
I wish it’d been true that DT had it. It’s a priceless feature if you ever lend documents for proofing or edits by others and for collaborative projects on committees and charity work.
