Interdependent change tracking, ODF proposal

[Miklos Vajna]

Hi Svante,

On Fri, Jun 06, 2025 at 05:40:15PM +0200, Svante Schubert <svante.schubert at gmail.com> wrote:
> To bring this back to your present proposal: consider a simple text "ABC"
> where I apply a red style to "AB" and you apply bold to "BC"—a clear case
> of overlapping changes. Should we aim to support such scenarios already
> now, or would this be better addressed in a future, more robust design once
> we’ve moved past the current workarounds?

Writer core at the moment has ~no support for overlapping tracked
changes: if you want to e.g. have a delete on top of an insert, then we
cut the original insert into pieces. E.g. <ins>A<del>B</del>C</ins> is
represented using 3 redlines in Writer: A is just an insert, B is a
delete with an underlying insert and C is another delete.

My ODF proposal is just meant to extent the schema to the markup that
(as far as I see) the Writer ODF import/export was always writing -- I
just ran into this problem because nobody wrote a test for this part of
the change tracking code previously and we require all ODF emitted by
the testcases to be valid ODF.

If you want to came up with a standard markup for collaboration, you can
do that -- but my proposal is way smaller: a simple extension to the
schema to acknowledge the markup that is already in many documents from
Writer. This also allows not losing formatting when converting between
DOCX and ODT.

My simple request was to file an ODF proposal for this, since I can't do
that myself.

Thanks,

Miklos