Redline comparison settings

Comparison settings give users the ability to define the content and appearance of comparisons, which provides more precise and tailored comparisons to their needs.

Draftable Legal has a dedicated comparison settings section, which provides many options so that your comparisons appear the way you want them to. This article includes information on the following topics:

• How to access the Redline comparison options
• How to create, use and export Redline setting profiles
• Comparison options and definitions
• Settings for tracked changes authors
• Ability to customize the markup schema

Navigating to the Redline comparison settings

Firstly, we need to open the settings menu, this can be done in a few ways:

1. Open settings via the Taskbar

   1. Right-click the Draftable icon in the taskbar

   2. Select Settings as the 2nd option

      

2. Or, open the settings menu via the New Comparison Window

   1. Open the New Comparison window

   2. Select Settings in the top right of the window

      

Once the settings menu is open navigate to the Redline tab. Here you have access to all the options that allow you to configure the appearance and contents of your comparisons.

The Redline comparison settings

There are a large number of configurable options available within the Redline settings section. Here you can fully customize they way your Redline comparison appear, and this section aims to breakdown and explain how to configure each setting option.

Profiles

Profiles are an easier way for you to switch between preset Redline comparison configurations, without having to manually setup the Redline settings menu for each different type of document use case.

Since profile configuration is an in-depth topic, we have a dedicated article here, which explains all the different components of Redline profiles.

Comparison options

Styles: Text styling includes changes in how the text appears. Disabling this option will also disable the 4 styles sub-options below.

• Text styling: Text styling includes bold, italic, caps, underline
• Font changes: Font changes include font, font family and font color
• Layout changes: Layout related includes indent and text alignment
• Miscellaneous: All other styling changes

Bullets and Numberings

Tables: Compares content within tables

Images: Compares images in the document (note, Draftable does not compare the content of images, only insertions, deletions and moving of whole images).

Text Boxes: changes in content contained within text boxes will be shown

Headers: changes in document headers will be shown when this is selected

Footers: changes in footers in the document, including page numbering changes

Footnotes and Endnotes: Marks up for footnotes and end-notes changes will be shown

Tables of Contents: Compares changes in Table of Contents

Watermarks: Will show both old and new watermarks on the document

Cover Pages: Markup for changes on cover page will be shown

Hidden text: When enabled, hidden text in input documents will be ‘unhidden’ by Draftable and then compared to display any changes as redline markups. In the redline output files, text that was hidden in the input file is shown in grey highlights.

Moved text: If enabled, this will detect whether text has moved within the comparison.

Case Insensitive Comparison: This toggle ignores capitalization changes in the document (e.g. changing ‘a’ to ‘A’ will not be shown as a change when this more is enabled)

Comparison Resolution: This setting option changes the way that the comparison is interpreted in terms of whether changes are detected between individual characters, or at a whole word level. There are two settings:

• Character level: Shows changes made to individual characters. This improves readability.
• Word level: Any change within a word, whether a single character or the entire word, will be displayed as an entire word change. Better for spotting changes.

Comment Options: The keep comments option allows you to select whether comments are maintained within the documents (or specific document) within the comparison, or skipped entirely. By default, they are enabled.

• Compare Comments: this option includes comments for comparison (comments changes will be shown as redlined)
• Show comments from both documents: Keeps comments from both documents without comparing them
• Show comments from the original document: Keeps comments from the older document only
• Show comments from the modified document: Keeps comments from the newer document only
• Hide all comments: Do not include any comments in the comparison output

Default summary page placement: The default summary page placement option allows you to add a summary page to the output and there are 3 options:

• Include at end: Adds a summary page at the end of the output
• Include at start: Adds a summary page at the start of the output
• Do not include: Does not add a summary page

Tracked Changes Author

There are specific options for the author of comparisons that are made using Tracked changes.

Default author: The author name that will be used for all changes in the Tracked Changes document outputs. It has the following options:

• Last modified by (from newer document): Shows who last modified the document.
• Document author (from newer document): Uses the author from the document.
• User Name (from office settings): Uses the user name from the office settings as the default author.
• User Initials (from office settings): Uses the user initials from the office settings as the default author.
• Custom value: If selected, allows you to enter your own custom string of text as the author within this settings window
• None: If selected, changes will not be given an author name

Show Author in New Comparison window: Displays the author name within the New Comparison window.

Word Tracked changes output

You can set the default behavior from when a Word Tracked changes output is created. These options are:

• Always ask: Will always ask whether to open or save the Word Tracked changes output, and doesn’t assume one of the below options.
• Open output: Immediately opens the output when the button is clicked.
• Save output: Immediately opens file explorer to save the output to your desired file location.

Filename output

This setting allows you to fully customize the file naming schema for Redline comparison outputs, using a combination both preset tags and your own free text to set to your desired filename schema. See the dedicated knowledge-base article here, which provides a full deep dive on how to use this feature

Markup schema

You can edit how the markup schema looks in your comparison or both insertion content, deletion content, moved content and revised lines. Customization include text-decoration and color for these detection’s, and a preview is shown whilst you make these selections.

For text decoration, options include:

• None: No text decoration is performed
• Bold: Bold style change is added
• Italic: Italic style change is added
• Underline: Underline style change is added
• Strikethrough: Strikethrough style change is added
• Double Underline: Double underline style change is added
• Double Strikethrough: Double strikethrough style change is added

For color, there is a range of colors that can be chosen to best suit your preferences.

Changes to the markup schema are automatically saved as you make them. When you have made all necessary changes click Done to close the window.