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Re: [opencm-dev] Re: [A few SCM lists] Diff/Comparison of file formats others than ASCII/source code?

From: Alan Langford <jal_at_ambitonline.com>
Date: 2002-08-15 15:50:53 CEST

At 2002/08/14 09:20 -0700, David Brown wrote:
>Other file formats cause the issue to become significantly more
>complicated. Take MS-word for example. Word itself will gladly show
>you document differences between two documents where small changes have
>been made to the contents of text. But what if one document has had
>significant formatting changes (change the paragraph style). How would
>you do a merge if one branch changed the formatting, and the other
>branch changed the text, or maybe a different aspect of the formatting.

I've been pondering this and it's even more fun than that. A good number of
Word documents contain drawn graphics, embedded images, embedded
spreadsheets, embedded Visio diagrams... you name it. Any diff utility that
understands Word needs to be able to accommodate plug-ins that understand
most major types of embedded object. It seems that implementing anything
close to a comprehensive Word diff is prohibitively complex.

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Received on Thu Aug 15 16:00:13 2002

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