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From: flowers@osf.osf.org (Ken Flowers)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Change bars in *roff
Message-ID: <888@paperboy.OSF.ORG>
Date: 15 Sep 89 19:25:32 GMT
References: <9262@blia.BLI.COM>
Sender: news@OSF.ORG
Reply-To: flowers@osf.org (Ken Flowers)
Organization: Open Software Foundation
Lines: 36

In article <9262@blia.BLI.COM> peterw@blia.BLI.COM (Peter Wisnovsky) writes:
>I am working on some man pages and would like to be able to make
>copies of them, edit them and print them out with change bars for
>review. Does anyone know of a program that highlites the changes
>between two *roff files? (Incidentally, I don't have ftp access to
>anywhere...)
>
>Peter Wisnovsky

UNIX has a very simple tool for doing this that is
available on most machines:

    diffmk old.file new.file chbar.file

Where:

old.file     is the name of the original file

new.file     is the name of the changed file

chbar.file   is the name of the file you want to
             create with changebars.

diffmk puts in changebars and deletionstars into
the chbar.file using the troff .mc directive.  The
.mc directive places the character given as its
argument in the margin on every line until .mc is
called with no argument.  You can then process the
chbar.file with troff to get the changebars.

Hope this helps.

Ken Flowers
flowers@osf.org
Documentation Engineer
The Open Software Foundation