BKM - Track changes for pdfs so user sees what changes done

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jbananak
Propeller Head
Posts: 59
Joined: Thu May 03, 2012 2:45 am

BKM - Track changes for pdfs so user sees what changes done

Post by jbananak »

Hi
How are you marking changes in projects so that it is easiest for reviewers to easily see what changes were made, without reviewing the whole document again (talking about PDF outputs)?
Apart from turning on the track changes (which I feel is buggy), are there any other easy non-time-consuming solutions?
Thanks in advance.
Joanna
doloremipsum
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Joined: Mon Aug 26, 2019 2:11 pm

Re: BKM - Track changes for pdfs so user sees what changes d

Post by doloremipsum »

I've had a go at this for our situation, where we send all our documents to an external organisation who need to know what we have changed.

I first thought we could use a PDF compare tool on the output to highlight changes in the text. This didn't work out very well. Some PDF tools compare the whole 'image' of the PDF, which causes them to hugely overreact to formatting changes compared to content changes (e.g. if there's an extra page break the whole thing goes out of alignment). Other tools compare the raw text. But this isn't great either, because Flare doesn't seem to consistenlty put spaces between words in the PDF (it seems like there's whitespace between the words in the PDF, but when the tool extracts the text all of the spaces disappear). So it becomes very hard to read and not really something I can send to a customer.

The inconvenient compromise is to create an MS Word version of the document as well (you can create an extra target with the same stylesheet and page layout - the formatting won't quite be right, but the content will be fine. Once you have an old version and a new version, open MS Word and use Review > Compare to compare the two documents. This generates a new document with tracked changes as if you had edited the word document itself. The main caveats I've found are: it doesn't like edits within tables; better to turn formatting changes off; it throws up false positives on images; it's a bit time consuming.

That is all for external review, of course. For internal review, I'd normally just keep mental track of what I've changed (or check my source control logs) and tell my colleagues what they should check.
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