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Finally, it is worth noting that some word processors, such as OpenOffice.org Writer and Microsoft Word, have three relevant features: document comparison, change tracking, and versions.

Document Comparison

Document Comparison allows you to compare documents when their native file format makes use of other diff tools difficult. You would use this when you have two copies of a document that didn’t have change tracking turned on, or when you need to merge feedback from various sources.

While it is trivial to unzip the content.xml file from a given OpenDoc file, the result has no line breaks and is not terribly pretty or readable. See Comparing Two Documents for a bash script that will do this low-level kind of difference.

Refer to the table below for information on how to access the built-in GUI comparison function, which is much easier than trying to do it manually.

Change Tracking and Versions

The change-tracking feature saves information about changes made to a document. Review mode uses various copyediting markup on the screen to display who did what, when. This is obviously useful for all kinds of creation and editing purposes, but please read our warnings.

The versions feature allows you to save more than one version of a document in a single file. This can be handy in all sorts of odd ways. For example, we’ve seen router configurations copied and pasted from a terminal into different versions inside the same document for archival and change control purposes.

Warning

The change ...