nisus.com

Hi,

Just to let everybody know of two examples of collaborative track changing I had to use in the recent months.

1) OpenOffice versioning. You save the current version of the document, and later you will be able to compare the older and newer version. Very handy, since you can send your close collaborators the very latest changes, and to your translators all changes from a much more remote date.

2) InDesign CS5 track changes. You must keep tracking turned on. If I understand correctly, you can only have all changes since the last time you reset all change markings. So, it's great for the work with your collaborators, but not handy for sending larger amounts of changes. Changes from different collaborators are tracked with different colors.

In both cases there are comments, even if implemented in a different way. NWP has a sofisticate, more efficent version of OpenOffice's comments.

The Compare Documents macro seems to me very similar to OpenOffice's versioning. Only, older documents must be saved separately (even if you can "track" them with the Document Manager).

I would be happy to see how others use change tracking and versioning, and understand if there are better ways than the one already offered by NWP, and how it should look like / differ from the one implemented in InDesign.

Paolo

Better late than never? I too would be interested to share experiences in version control.

Change tracking in NWP 2 is a great leap forward, and seems to work well when exchanging files with Word users. Has anyone had problems with this?

I also love the Compare Documents macro for its clean output and the ability to mark changes at word, clause or para level.

But I value Word's ability to compare two documents and mark the changes using the standard change tracking system. Is there any chance this could be replicated in NWP?

I don't have any experience with the OpenOffice versioning system you mention, though it sounds good. I have always avoided Word's ability to do the same thing because I had heard it was not reliable, though I can't confirm this. On the web, Writeboard (http://writeboard.com/) does versioning rather well, IMO. I use InDesign (CS4) but not in contexts where change tracking is needed.

I work as an editor, and many of my clients expect me to use change tracking. The trouble is that what they call proofreading is often closer to rewriting. When there are many small edits, I find that normal change tracking markup just becomes a mess. It would be good to have a more intelligent system that goes beyond simple insertions and deletions, and replicates traditional editors' markup, such as "upper case" or "transpose words".

Charles