Text-Only Compare: How to compare documents without formatting

Text-Only Compare mode strips formatting, styles, and layout from DOCX and PDF files to focus purely on substantive text changes — ideal for troubleshooting comparison errors or cutting through formatting noise.

Text-Only Compare mode allows you to run comparisons that focus purely on document text — stripping out all formatting, styles, numbering, and layout details. This gives you a clean, distraction-free view of the substantive changes between two documents.

What is Text-Only Compare?

Text-Only Compare is a comparison type in Draftable Legal that extracts and compares only the text content (including comments) from DOCX and PDF files. All formatting, styles, numbering, and layout information is removed before the comparison runs.

This produces a simplified redline output that highlights what has actually changed in the document’s content, without any formatting-related noise.

When to use Text-Only Compare

Text-Only Compare is particularly useful in the following scenarios:

• Files with complex formatting — Documents containing overlapping charts, tables, or other complex layout elements that produce cluttered or unexpected results in standard comparisons
• Troubleshooting comparison errors — When a standard comparison produces an error or fails to complete, Text-Only Compare acts as a reliable fallback by bypassing the formatting that may be causing the issue
• Focusing on substantive changes — When you only need to identify what text has changed and formatting differences are not relevant to your review
• Comparing documents with inconsistent styling — When two versions of a document use different templates, styles, or formatting conventions that would otherwise generate excessive markup

Combine Text-Only Compare with Three Pane View to view the text-only redline output alongside the original source documents for full context.

How to run a Text-Only Compare

1. Open the New Comparison window

   Open the Draftable Legal New Comparison window.

2. Load your documents

   Select the two DOCX or PDF documents you want to compare, either by browsing your files or dragging and dropping them into the comparison window.

3. Select Text-Only in Draftable

   In the Comparison Type dropdown, select Text-Only in Draftable.

   
4. Run the comparison

   Click the Compare button to run the comparison. Draftable will strip the formatting from both documents and compare the text content only.

5. Review the results

   The text-only redline output will open in the Draftable Comparison Viewer. You can review the changes using the same viewer features available for standard redline comparisons, including the interactive Change List, tagging, filtering, and export options.

   

What is included and excluded

Included in comparison	Excluded from comparison
Document text content	Formatting and styles
Comments	Numbering and list formatting
	Layout and page structure
	Charts, images, and other non-text elements

Administrator configuration

Administrators can enable or disable Text-Only Compare for their organisation using Group Policy.

Key: HKCU:\Software\Policies\Draftable\Feature
Value name: IsTextOnlyCompareOutputEnabled
Value type: Boolean
Value data: true (default) / false

When disabled, the Text-Only Compare option will not appear in the Compare Selector or 1-Click Compare operations.

Text-Only Compare was introduced in the January 2026 (v26.1) release.