Reviewing Documents

Tracking Document Changes

Track Changes is a way to keep track of the changes you make to a document. To activate track changes for the current document, either choose Edit > Review > Track Changes or click the Track Changes button on the Review toolbar. When Track Changes is enabled, your modifications are highlighted using a distinctive color. The name of the author who is currently making changes and the colors can be customized from the Review preferences page.

Figure: Change Tracking in Author Mode

When hovering over a change the tooltip displays information about the author and modification time.

Track Changes highlights textual changes and also changes that you make to the attributes in a document. Here is the list of tracked changes:

Inserting, deleting content (text or elements)
Drag and drop content (text or elements)
Cutting or pasting content (text or elements)
Inserting, deleting, and changing the structure of tables
Inserting and editing lists and their content
Inserting and deleting entities
Inserting and deleting element tags
Editing attributes
Performing a Split operation
Performing a Surround with operation

If the selection in the Author view contains tracked changes and you are copying it, the clipboard contains the selection with all the accepted changes. This filtering is performed only if the selection is not entirely inside a tracked change. The changes are stored in the document as processing instructions and they do not interfere with validating and transforming it. For each change, the author name and the modification time are preserved.

The following processing instruction is an example of how an insert change is stored in a document:

<?oxy_insert_start author="John Doe" timestamp="20090408T164459+0300"?>all<?oxy_insert_end?>

The following processing instruction is an example of how an delete change is stored in a document:

<?oxy_delete author="John Doe" timestamp="20090508T164459+0300" content="belong"?>

Note: Tracked changes are also shown in the Outline view. Deleted content is rendered with a strike through.

Adding Document Comments

You can associate a note or a comment to a selected area of content. Comments can highlight virtually any content from your document, except read-only text. The difference between such comments and change tracking is that a comment can be associated to an area of text without modifying or deleting the text.

The actions for managing comments are Add Comment, Edit Comment, Remove Comment, and Manage reviews. They are available on the Review toolbar and in the Review submenu of the contextual menu in Author mode.

Tip: The comments are stored in the document as processing instructions, containing information about the author name and the comment time:

<?oxy_comment_start author="John Doe" timestamp="20090508T164459+0300" comment="Do not change this content"?>
    Important content
<?oxy_comment_end?>

Comments are persistent highlights with a colored background. The background color is customizable or can be assigned automatically by the application. This behavior can be controlled from the Review preferences page.

Note: Oxygen XML Editor presents the tracked changes in DITA conrefs and XInclude fragments.