<html> <head> <base href="https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/"> </head> <body> <div> <a class="bz_bug_link bz_status_NEW " title="NEW - EDITING: Compare documents on near-identical files flags 99.9% of the contents as different" href="https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=102616#c11">Comment # 11</a> on <a class="bz_bug_link bz_status_NEW " title="NEW - EDITING: Compare documents on near-identical files flags 99.9% of the contents as different" href="https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=102616">bug 102616</a> from <a class="email" href="mailto:luke.kendall@gmail.com" title="Luke Kendall <luke.kendall@gmail.com>"> Luke Kendall</a> <pre>This bug is as bad or worse in Writer 6.2.3.2. Because I was preparing 4 editions of my book, I have 4 versions of the MS. I'll need to report several bugs in Writer for this. Anyway, because of these other bugs, it was important to compare the different MSes. Writer never was able to provide a useful comparison. In the end I had to use MS Office365 to compare .docx versions of the MSes saved from Writer. This was doing a merge comparison. The main problems I had with Writer were (in order of seriousness): 1. As reported, basically the entire document is flagged as changed. This applied even when the documents used the same paragraph styles (except for chapter title paragraph style), same page format, and same body text paragraph style. 2. Undo of a file comparison is not just incomplete, applying Undo can introduce unexpected changes. On one occasion, the Undo changed the final body paragraphs by applying an All Capitals attribute. My recollection is that it also left some Chapter Title paragraphs in a strange state, as well as losing some page breaks. 3. Writer would often crash as soon as the comparison started. 4. After recovery from said crash, the Manage Changes dialog would be open for every recovered document, and have to be closed separately. I also noticed that the .docx files produced by Writer are difficult for other word processors to compare. This was because regardless of how little editing I had done to my MS, for every real change I had made there would be 10 or 20 "null differences" found by the other word processor. These usually but not always appeared as a space character at the end of paragraphs, but sometimes between words in a paragraph. I don't know if it's indicative of an underlying problem, but ONLY Office365 could produce useful comparisons of Writer-generated .docx files of the same root document. The others I tried tended to produce very large swathes of changes that were marked as different even though painstaking visual comparison showed them to be identical. So I suspect one issue with the Writer file compare algorithm is that it may be comparing the underlying data structures, not the visible data (detectable by a user) - by which I mean, for any run of text, the paragraph, character, page styles, and the literal characters.</pre> </div> <hr> You are receiving this mail because: <ul> <li>You are the assignee for the bug.</li> </ul> </body> </html>