Copy and paste tracked changes

[libreleo]

Hi, Let me start by saying that I started working with linre office very recently and i am really enjoying it so far.

I am currently working with libreoffice on the revision of a research paper. What i need to provide is the document with the original text plus track changes indicated as insertions (green) and deletions (struck through and red), and i have managed to do that, so far so good. Now what i need to have in addition is another document where i specifically address the reviewers questions, and then show the specific sections from the first document that i changed to address that question. This needs to be formatted the same way as the changes shown by the track changes feature in the first document, so i would like to just be able to copy paste it from there. However this only copies the text but not the formatting. I hope i made clear what i need, so hopefully someone knows if this is possible and if so how.

Thank you!

About LibreOffice: Version: 6.4.7.2 Build ID: 1:6.4.7-0ubuntu0.20.04.6 CPU threads: 4; OS: Linux 5.4; UI render: default; VCL: kf5; Locale: de-DE (en_US.UTF-8); UI-Language: en-US Calc: threaded

But I also have the option of updating the version to the most recent one, if that provides said feature.

[robleyd]

Cross posted on Reddit. If you cross post, please let us know that you have done so, otherwise it leads to several discussions and a waste of time because several identical answers may be posted by different users.

Have you tried Paste Special and use the option LibreOffice Text Document (or similar).

[libreleo]

Thanks for the reply, I have tried your suggestion but that also does not work. It will copy the text as if changes had been approved, and not display the tracked changes with the green/red formatting, unfortunately.

[ajlittoz]

I’m afraid you can’t. Track changes is “intrinsic” to a document. Transferring data to another document will copy only “final” text without its history. Transferred data will be incorporated into the destination document revision history as a whole. In other words, documents are independent from each other from the revision history point of view.

You can however “augment” your document with comments where reviewers will ask their questions. You answer them in other comments associated or not with text modifications. Comments are “signed” by the name entered in User data so that you easily identify who made them.

This requires nevertheless some discipline if you have several reviewers because you can’t copy a comment and keep its “signature”. Therefore, either you circulate sequentially a single copy to your reviewers or you devise a way to manually add the reviewer name when you merge the comments into your “master” copy.

[libreleo]

Thank you for taking the time to reply and explain it so thoroughly. I suspected that this was the case, but still hoped that there is some special way of doing it. I think it would be very useful if it was possible to copy paste these in LibreOffice, for example in Microsoft Word (can’t/wouldn’t use it on linux) it is apparently implemented using a spike (Pasting Text with Track Changes (Microsoft Word)). I think I will just copy paste the original text and then apply the changes directly to both documents in “Track Changes” mode.