red-lining

["David S. Kaufer" <kaufer+ -at- ANDREW -dot- CMU -dot- EDU>]

Part of the research we are doing in the prep editor project (see my
earlier post) is to experiment with heuristics that can automatically
change the level of the "change report" based upon the number of edits
made between the original and revised document. For example, if, within
a single sentence, a writer makes, say, 30 separate edits, we find that
users don't like a report of changes at the character or even word
level, but would rather simply be notified that the whole sentence has
changed. On the other hand, as the number of edits drop, the change
report needs to become increasingly fine-grained. Users of the prep
editor can set these heuristics as they please (we call this process
"flexible diffing"--- but at this time, we have little empirical data
about what the appropriate default settings should be -- or whether
these settings need to change across document types. If any of you have
any experience (much less data) in this area, your input would be
welcome.

The experience of our group seems to suggest that substantial move
operations are very difficult to report electronically. If any of you
know of red-lining software that has an interface to support move
information elegantly (in a way that supports revision processes without
turning to paper), I'd be interested to know about it.

david kaufer
carnegie mellon
kaufer -at- andrew -dot- cmu -dot- edu or
prep.project.andrew.cmu.edu