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:
- Open settings via the Taskbar
- Right-click the Draftable icon in the taskbar
- Select Settings as the 2nd option
- Or, open the settings menu via the New Comparison Window
- Open the New Comparison window
- 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
Headers and Footers: Compare headers and footers in the document, including page numbering change
Footnotes and Endnotes: Marks up for footnotes and end-notes changes will be shown
Watermarks: Will show both old and new watermarks on the document
Cover Pages: Markup for changes on cover page will be shown
Moved text: If enabled, this will detect whether text has moved within the comparison.
Show changes at: 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.
Keep comments: 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.
- Skip comments: Do not include any comments in the comparison
- From older document: Keeps comments from the older document
- From newer document: Keeps comments from the newer document
- From both documents: Keeps comments from both documents
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.
- Custom value: If selected, allows you to enter your own custom string of text as the author within this settings window
- 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.
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.
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
For color, there is a range of colors that can be chosen to best suit your preferences.
If you want to confirm your changes for the markup schema, ensure you click save.