Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!iuvax!rutgers!pyrnj!esquire!yost
From: yost@esquire.UUCP (David A. Yost)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Change bars in *roff
Message-ID: <1421@esquire.UUCP>
Date: 18 Sep 89 19:42:56 GMT
References: <9262@blia.BLI.COM> <888@paperboy.OSF.ORG>
Reply-To: yost@esquire.UUCP (David A. Yost)
Organization: DP&W, New York, NY
Lines: 30

In article <888@paperboy.OSF.ORG> flowers@osf.org (Ken Flowers) writes:
>In article <9262@blia.BLI.COM> peterw@blia.BLI.COM (Peter Wisnovsky) writes:
>>Does anyone know of a program that highlites the changes
>>between two *roff files?
>
>UNIX has a very simple tool for doing this that is
>available on most machines:
>
>    diffmk old.file new.file chbar.file

Beware diffmk.
1.  It runs ed, and ed (still) has some annoying hard limits that
    you can exceed, causing bizarre results.
2.  The last line of a range of filled text that should be marked
    with change bars may not be marked.  I think there was a hack
    you could do to the file to correct this, but I can't remember
    what it is.

I think change bars are an extremely valuable
facility, making it feasible to check the
correctness of successive document revisions
without things falling through the cracks.
(I mean, who is going to read every word of a
large document over and over.  Nobody.)

It's too bad that the automatic, reliable
generation of change bars is not taken more
seriously.

 --dave yost