Is there an app (inc word) that can give me a knowledge base of changes?
May 7, 2019 6:25 AM Subscribe
I'm trying to improve my writing in a foreign language. Things like word's track changes are great for one document, but I want a way to search such that it will search the before and after in a group of documents. Does this exist?
My goal is to have a sort of personal knowledge base based on past corrections that have been made, as it can be helpful to go back and see where I've made the mistake before etc. But I haven't come up with a great workflow. I'm open to new apps.
Right now I use a sort of cumbersome notes.app based workflow. The downside is I don't get the convenience and nice UI of word's track changes, but the upside is it's easy to search a folder of documents. I'd like to be able to leverage a higher quality, less labor intensive track changes (like word's), but with better search of the before and after.
I'm open to any suggestions.
My goal is to have a sort of personal knowledge base based on past corrections that have been made, as it can be helpful to go back and see where I've made the mistake before etc. But I haven't come up with a great workflow. I'm open to new apps.
Right now I use a sort of cumbersome notes.app based workflow. The downside is I don't get the convenience and nice UI of word's track changes, but the upside is it's easy to search a folder of documents. I'd like to be able to leverage a higher quality, less labor intensive track changes (like word's), but with better search of the before and after.
I'm open to any suggestions.
Are you looking for something that tracks every change you make, or just a comparison of the first and final versions?
If it's the latter that makes your life much easier, and you can look into all the versions of "diff" out there that would best fit your needs. Basically you'd save an "original" version for a file and then save all subsequent alterations under another file name, and use some diff tool to automatically compare the two versions of every file in a directory.
Otherwise, or if you're looking for tools specifically meant for Word, I don't know whether what you're looking for exists. But some light searching (caveat: I haven't tried any of this personally) gives the impression that there are functions in the Word API (the interface that lets you write programs to control Word or use its functions) that you, or someone, could use to create a script that does what you want.
posted by trig at 1:07 AM on May 8, 2019
If it's the latter that makes your life much easier, and you can look into all the versions of "diff" out there that would best fit your needs. Basically you'd save an "original" version for a file and then save all subsequent alterations under another file name, and use some diff tool to automatically compare the two versions of every file in a directory.
Otherwise, or if you're looking for tools specifically meant for Word, I don't know whether what you're looking for exists. But some light searching (caveat: I haven't tried any of this personally) gives the impression that there are functions in the Word API (the interface that lets you write programs to control Word or use its functions) that you, or someone, could use to create a script that does what you want.
posted by trig at 1:07 AM on May 8, 2019
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posted by rockindata at 10:53 AM on May 7, 2019