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Re: showing text correlation - other than by color ?

Subject: Re: showing text correlation - other than by color ?
From: "Monique Semp" <monique -dot- semp -at- earthlink -dot- net>
To: <mbaker -at- analecta -dot- com>, "'Wright, Lynne'" <Lynne -dot- Wright -at- Kronos -dot- com>, "'TechWR-L'" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2017 12:59:58 -0800

Iâm going to go with breaking things up into rows, and include some sort of color indication for each row/concept. Perhaps I'll use something like a change-bar, or include a graphic-colored-thick-line in a new column, or some such thing. And then a color-key/legend (with shading/pattern differences so that we don't miss color-blind comprehension) is easily added, too.

But to answer the good questions:

If there are large passages of both docs that are the same, and then some parts that differ between the two, the simplest way to show this might be to print the common parts in a single page-wide column and where the documents diverge, break the page into two columns, one for each version. This way there is really no need to highlight anything.

First, the relevant doc sections aren't very long; the whole table fits on a single page. And the table is to show just the equivalent parts, not the parts that diverge.

Of course, the viability of this depends on exactly how fine grained you want the calling out of differences to be. If two sentences differ in the placement of a comma, for instance, it is necessary to highlight that comma, or is it enough to note that the two sentences differ and allow the reader to find the difference for themselves?

It's a conceptual comparison, not something like a track-changes thing. So wording/punctuation is different, and not relevant.

I'm a little confused: are you saying that there are a series of text excerpts from one doc in column 1, and the equivalent excerpts from doc 2 are in the second column, but there are no row breaks between each excerpt? Because then for sure I'd say break the content up so that its one passage per row; otherwise it must be tricky keeping them horizontally aligned with each other.

Correct. And yes, I agree that breaking it up into rows of equivalent concept is the thing to do.

And can you clarify how are the colors currently applied... are you saying that each text passage may contain multiple colored highlights, with each color representing some kind of coded difference? Or are the colors used to highlight equivalent text for comparison?

Right now, each doc's long column contains multiple color-highlights. Concept-1 is yellow, concept-2 is red, concept-3 is blue... So each color shows the equivalence of one concept.

If the docs are mostly equivalent, couldn't you only highlight the parts that DON'T match, using some neutralish grey highlight?

What doesn't match is irrelevant. The goal is to show equivalent concepts in both docs (which are from completely different sources, written at different times).

-Monique
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References:
showing text correlation - other than by color ?: From: Monique Semp
RE: showing text correlation - other than by color ?: From: Wright, Lynne
RE: showing text correlation - other than by color ?: From: mbaker

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