I would have expected some other replies before now, if there was anything
well-known that solves this problem. The absence of any replies reinforces
my
opinion that no such thing exists. I assume that by stressing "rich text",
you mean
to imply that you need to compare not only the text content of your
documents,
but also the formatting.
In my opinion, it is just too hard. Not so much the problem of detecting the
differences in formatting, but more the problem of devising a suitable
visual
interface to display the results. The commonly used side-by-side arrangement
is unsuitable, because differences in font size make it impossible to
guarantee
aligning the two files so the view remains synchronized. Using a single
window
for both files (as in CSDiff or the MS Word compare facility) won't work
either,
again due to possible differences in fonts and sizing.
One possibility (still not very satisfactory) would be to treat your rich
text docs
as plain text, and then compare using a standard plain text comparator. This
will
show up both text and formatting differences, but the rich text encoding is
very
ugly to read in plain text. You might get a slightly better result by
converting your
docs to HTML and comparing those as plain text.
You _might_ find something of more use to you at this link:
http://www.foldermatch.com/fmcompetitors.htm
It lists, fairly comprehensively, most of the text file comparison tools
around,
both freeware and commercial.
HTH,
Adrian Carter
