just discovered this software after a long search for the best tool to suit my needs (writing a thesis in political scienes about an amendment of some law), maybe i'm finally successful?
what i want to do is compare two versions of the same law to find differences introduced after the amendment. now here character differences are not important and differences in whole lines of text neither, as the distribution of text of the law over the lines will most probably have changed, even if the text itself has remained unchanged. now my questions:
1) is it possible to compare two text files (say, two pdfs or a pdf and an ms word file) so the differences interesting to me will be displayed? as well as what hasn't been changed?
2) as laws come in paragraphs, would it be possible to have mostly identical paragraphs (even if their number or place within the whole text has changed) displayed side-by-side?
i just tried to do such a comparison and find that in big parts identical paragaphs are not recognised as such and not displayed next to each other or marked in colours.
3) another very handsome feature to me would be to have simply two text boxes where you could just paste text to be compared, manually copied from whatever application. like this you wouldn't have to compare entire files when you know it's only little paragraphs you're interested in anyway.
i just can't imagine there is no way to do this, whith so many lawyers and politicians out there not wanting to compare laws manually line by line...
i now look forward to your suggestions!!
thank you very much,
katha