Change tracking interchange with Word

[jhecht]

I typically write RTF files in NWPro and exchange them with editors and colleagues, many of whom work in Word. When they use change tracking, they sometimes keep the file in RTF format, which I have set to open in NWPro.

On occasion those files can be horribly messy, and I just received one that seemed to contain hundreds of tiny changes, each marked as a separate change to track -- making it totally unusable. In one section there were a bewildering array of font changes, many of them thinks like kerning a font 0.15 point. To make matters worse, they were all cut off on the right so it wasn't clear what the change was. Trying to enlarge the window did not show more of the change box. I'm attaching a clip to show the problem.

Any idea what's going on here and what can be done about it? Could the problem be that the Word user does not have a font I was using on their system, (or I don't have a font they have)? This makes the whole change tracking process unusable.

[phspaelti]

One idea, if you think you are not interested in the formatting changes, is to run a macro like the following which will just accept them and thereby remove them.

Code: Select all

$doc = Document.active

$FormattingChanges = 0
foreach $tc in $doc.allTrackedChanges
  if $tc.isTextAttributesChanged
    $FormattingChanges += 1
    $tc.accept
  end
end
prompt $FormattingChanges & ' tracked formatting changes have been removed'

If this is too blunt, one could probably change it to only accept changes of certain types, such as those that make "small" changes (e.g. change a font, or a font size by a small amount, or those that change the kerning etc.).

[phspaelti]

To make matters worse, they were all cut off on the right so it wasn't clear what the change was. Trying to enlarge the window did not show more of the change box. I'm attaching a clip to show the problem.

To be able to see more of the text changes, first make the window larger, and then adjust the separator between the document and the tracked changes pane to make the pane wider and the document narrower.