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Interdependent tracked changes improvements in Writer, part 2

Estimated read time: 2 minutes

Writer has some support for interdependent (or hierarchical) tracked changes: e.g. the case when you have a delete on top of an insert. See the first post for background.

This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.

Motivation

With the already mentioned improvements in place, a few areas were still lacking: we didn't have UI for all cases where the DOCX import was possible already; combining tracked changes (redlines) were not complete (so you don't have to reject all parts of a logical redline one by one) and some of the undo/redo code didn't work as expected.

Results so far

Here is a sample case where the UI was missing to create something that was possible to import from DOCX: a format redline on top of an insert redline.

If you had a document with an insert:

Interdependent tracked change: just insert

And you selected BBB to mark those characters as bold, we just updated the existing insert redline to be bold:

Interdependent tracked change: old, format is not tracked separately

But now we track a format change on top of the insert separately:

Interdependent tracked change: new, format is tracked separately

This is also visible if you open the track changes dialog, which explains that now you have part of the insert redline covered by a format redline:

Interdependent tracked change: UI dialog now showing multiple redlines

How is this implemented?

If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)

As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes. Core side:

Want to start using this?

You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 25.04 and try it out yourself right now: try the development edition. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (25.8).

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