FM Compare Books Utility

[rombanks]

Hello fellows,

I have recently tested the "Compare Books" utility available in FM10. It works well except for the following:

1. Does not create a BookCMP file, so if you would like to create a book out of the resulting CMP files, you have to create such a book or rename the CMP files and put them back in the original book.

2. When comparing changes between tables, Framemaker does not highlight the changes but just brings the 2 versions of the same table into the CMP file, which is really confusing.

I wonder if anybody else uses this feature and how you deal with these 2 problems.

Thanks!

[Arnis_Gubins]

#2. That's been true in all versions of FM. The entire table will be highlighted as different - not the rows or cells that actually are. Note: Acrobat has a fairly powerful compare documents feature that might work better if you have many tables.

[Bob_Niland]

> Acrobat has a fairly powerful compare documents feature that might work better if you have many tables.

Yes, but it chokes on large documents (i.e. garden variety FM manuals), at least at Acrobat 9.

"These documents are too complex for selected mode."

Are later versions any more capable?

[rombanks]

Hi Error7103,

You are right - the Acrobat comparison utility is awkward too.

[rombanks]

Hi Arnis,

Thanks for your response. The new version of the table is even not highlighted - it is just added underneath the old one. Very awkward feature...

Acrobat can hardly compare 250 pages. The resulting PDF contains thousands of annotations that make it almost irresponsive to any filtering action.

[Gloria_Mc]

A little late to join this thread, but we just upgraded from FM 8 to FM 12.  Extremely disappointed with Adobe that they have not improved the table comparison capabilities. My workaround is to copy the old/new tables into Word and compare them in Word. Irritating and inconvenient. Adobe should be ashamed.