Comparing documents show lots of huge insertions/deletions, why?

[antonlopez]

Hi!

I switched from Ms Word to LO last year, so I’m sort of a newbie. I’m trying to compare two long documents. The first one is the original text, and the second one is an edited version of that first text. The edited version has only minor changes (ortog. corrections, etc.), but when comparing the two documents LibreOffice flags entire paragraphs as deleted, followed by the new version of the paragraph flagged as inserted, thus avoiding the comparison of the minor changes I made. Only a few paragraphs get a good, word-by-word comparison, normally the ones at the beginning and at the end of the document.

I’d like to know why does this happen and how to fix it. I work as an editor and this tool is basic for me.

Thanks a lot in advance!!

[catbill]

I found the same problem and spent a lot of time trying to solve it. In several cases, people who tried to answer my posts took some convincing that this is even an issue. It appears that the compare documents feature is not commonly used. Given that track changes is nearly impossible to use with large documents (because it becomes so slow), this is a problem.

Finally, I found that this was recorded as a bug a few years ago and repairing it does not sound easy.

I also work as an editor and what I have decided to do is not use either track changes or compare documents but to just compare the before and after versions using Word. There really isn’t a good alternative, as far as I can tell.

In my case, I can use the local library for comparing documents but I realize that not everyone is so fortunate as to have that option.

[antonlopez]

Wow, thank you catbill! I think I was the only one still going through this nowadays. I chose not to use Word for ethical reasons, although it’s the only piece of software, that I know, where doc comparison works as it should.

I suppose you’re referring to ye olde bug record: Bug #782406 “LibreOffice Writer Document Compare (regression)” : Bugs : libreoffice package : Ubuntu