Looking for a Document Comparer that can generate difference reports.

Question

I've been using an application called "WinMerge" lately for document comparisons, but one of the requirements of my teams script files (for auditing purposes) is that when we release a revision of a script we highlight the changes in red (RTF format I believe, it's through Lotus Notes) To that end, is there any software that can automatically highlight changes for me or is the best I'm going to get a list of differences and be expected to manually highlight all changes?

Answer 1

If an HTML report is acceptable, Beyond Compare can generate a comparison report that highlights differences. You can use the built-in stylesheets or a custom internal one to style the differences in red (the default is a light red color already).

It doesn't seem to be able to generate RTF, but perhaps there is a simple conversion between html/css and rtf.

Answer 2

Assuming an HTML+CSS solution meets your needs, this article from Linux Journal shows a shell script that reads diff output and writes an HTML document with colored text highlighting the differences.

On Windows, it would probably work as-is under bash as provided in the MSYS environment from the MinGW folk or in bash from Cygwin. The script itself isn't too large, I would imagine it could be ported to Perl with only a moderate effort.

Since converting HTML to RTF turns out not to have a trivial solution that I've found, you might have better luck porting the script to directly output RTF.