Can you diff two Word docs with Word? Afaik you can only hit the "track changes" button, which doesn't help if you got a new version of a document from someone else.
Setting aside the hyperbole, I believe it would be a conceptual nightmare to start defining concat of two docs. For simple cases, feel free to make copy pasta :-)
> I believe it would be a conceptual nightmare to start defining concat of two docs.
Just append the pages of document 2 to the end of document 1. Then the user can decide whether to remove the page break introduced by it. I have this in my env for doing this with PDF:
$ cat =concatpdf
#!/bin/bash
if [ "$1" = "to" ]; then
shift
gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=$*
else
echo Usage: concatpdf to out.pdf in.pdf in2.pdf in3.pdf
fi
The peculiar syntax with "to" ensures that I do not invocate it incorrectly.
Classic Word workflow: I make a document and send it to my boss; he makes some changes but suggests further research etc. and sends me his altered version, but I stupidly work on my own version. Making this right takes like four clicks.
Syncdocs [0] is also pretty good for merging and tracking changes between Word and Google Docs. It also has a feature with real-time collaboration between Google Docs and Word.
It works if you don't change formatting, don't edit the same section, don't rearrange chapters and don't have lots of changes or a large document. You do any of that, and the application crashes.
It's good for a small fix, but not something to rely upon in your main documentation workflow.
Even if you can do it with Word, GUI interactions aren't composable and extensible the way shell commands are, so you're limited to the features the GUI designer thought of.
>GUI interactions aren't composable and extensible the way shell commands are
They might not be in word, but they absolutely can be, and in fact are a superset of CLI interactions (since a GUI interaction step in e.g. Automator can invoke any shell command).
>so you're limited to the features the GUI designer thought of
And in the traditional shell pipeline (that is, not Powershell) I'm limited to working on dumb streams from one command to another.
Aside from multi platform, BC has things like CSV compare and marking unimportant changes are fairly robust. I do personally prefer open source myself, but BC is certainly one of the few that I didn't mind paying for.
