Whenever you work with other people on a document, whether they’re co-writers contributing changes and comments, editors recommending revisions, or even yourself adding and cutting a work for reprint or re-pitching, you run into the problem of how to compare the documents in a useful, productive way. Word’s “Track Changes” is good if you’re the kind of person who wears a hair shirt and sleep on a bed of downy barbed wire — for everyone else, it’s ugly, cluttered, and difficult to work with,  Side-by-side comparison tools exist — Word 2007 has this built in — but they rely on the writer’s ability to recognize subtle differences that are often too subtle for work-weary eyes.

TextFlow, a product now in public testing, offers a remedy to those issues. THeir product offers changes in a gorgeously colored and incrediblywell-designed format that makes it a breeze to identify, review, and accept or reject changes — even between several documents at once.

TextFlow is an Adobe AIR app, which means it will run on any system that can run Flash; if you don’t have the AIR engine on your computer already, the TextFlow installer will offer to download and install it before installing the TextFlow program itself. Once installed, using TextFlow is easy. Drag your “base” document into the TextFlow window, and once it opens, drag one or more revised files onto the same window. TextMate will take some time to scan through all the documents and compile the differences, then incorporate any new or changed text in the second documents directly into the first. Each document’scontributions are color-coded and can be accepted or rejected with a single click (hover your mouse over a change and the menu fades into view overlaid on the change itself — click one end of the text block to accetp, the other to reject).

As I said, TextFlow is still in testing, so you may well run into bugs andother problems using it. I wanted to see how well it would work with real-world documents (you can download sample documents from teir website, but who knows how they might  have been optimized for TextFlow), so I imported a manuscript I had submitted to an editor a couple months ago nad the revised text I just reviewed last week. TextFlow took quite a while to process the second document, leading me to think the app had crashed when instead, it was just working. Once done, though, it did a good job of recognizing and formatting changes so that I could quickly and easily see what I wanted to do.

I would say, give TextMate a try and see if it works for you and your way of working. At least for now, the product is free and beingupdated frequently in response to users’ problems. In fact, a new update this morning seems to promise to fix the processing speed issue I just complained about. So  try it out!

TextFlow (Free) 

Creating a Master Document isn’t all that hard, but it’s a little fiddly – you have to get the styles just right and you need to set everything up from the beginning for best results. Sebastien Berthet emailed me about his solution to the same problem, a program he created called Chapter by Chapter.

Chapter by Chapter is a free plugin companion (Update: Sebastian tells me that the program stands alone and therefore is not technically a “plugin”) for Word – it works with Word 1997 through Word 2007 – that allows you to pull together multiple documents into a single longer one. In addition, the program places an outline view in a pane to the left of your editing window, allowing you to jump back and forth between the various pieces of your manuscript with ease. When you’re done, Chapter by Chapter handles the task of compiling the documents.

Since Chapter by Chapter uses the built-in cut-and-paste function  to assemble the final document, it doesn’t have the same file and text corruption issues Master Documents users sometimes run into (although Word 2007 fixes a lot of those problems, too) – only the text and basic formatting is moved, not all the underlying options and style information that Word dumps into its files.

More importantly, while you need Word to do the work of outlining the document and assembling the pieces, once a document is associated with your project you can use any word processor to work on it (as long as you don’t change the file format). Which means you can transfer the document to a Palm or Windows Mobile device and edit it on the go, or stick it on a flash drive and work on it with whatever software a computer at the library, Internet cafe, or parent’s house has installed. When you come home, copy the revised document over the original, fire up Chapter by Chapter, and you’re good to go.

Ultimately, Chapter by Chapter just provides a more elegant interface than Words Master Documents and Document Map features. Sebastien has made a lot of effort to make Chapter by Chapter easy to use, and to make it work well with other tools writers might use (like SuperNoteCard). Especially if you’re using pre-2007 versions of Word, you should definitely look into Chapter by Chapter.

Chapter by Chapter (Free)