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Find Duplicate Passages

Posted: 2011-07-24 11:58:50
by wolane
Hi all--

Does anyone have, or know, a Macro which can find duplicate passages? I'm working with a 200-page document in which I've been doing a lot of cutting and pasting, and I'm afraid some paragraphs or sentences might have been pasted more than once, or copy/pasted rather than cut/pasted. I've been finding that Compare Documents macro very useful for merging different versions of chapters, so I wonder if there might also be a way to automate the search for duplications. Any thoughts?

Thanks.

BILL.

Re: Find Duplicate Passages

Posted: 2011-07-24 17:59:16
by martin
Hi Bill- certainly a macro could do such a thing. The question is, what constitutes a duplicate? A sentence that's exactly the same? What about if a few words are arranged differently, or you use a slightly different word choice (eg: "in" instead of "within")? Getting all those details right would take some work.

Re: Find Duplicate Passages

Posted: 2011-07-24 18:34:35
by wolane
Well, Martin, I was imagining it would work the same as the document comparison macro... in other words, at the paragraph level or at the sentence level, the structure would have to be identical.

BILL.

Re: Find Duplicate Passages

Posted: 2011-07-25 15:30:03
by martin
This macro might serve your needs. It creates a copy of the frontmost/active document, and marks all duplicates in that copy with special bookmarks. These bookmarks will be listed at the end of the duplicated document.

Re: Find Duplicate Passages

Posted: 2011-07-25 18:13:42
by wolane
Wow that’s amazing, Martin, and it totally works. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit, it found two duplicated passages in my 227 page document.
Nisus is a truly great program, especially with those macros!

BILL.