determine is text was typed in or pasted into a document

[Andy G]

Is it possible to determine if the text in a document was pasted in from
another source or typed in letter by letter? I have a word document and I
want to find out if this person wrote it themselves or copy and pasted it
into the document. I'm thinking maybe a 3rd party software that could do
this or something...

Hopefully someone out there can point me in the right direction.
Thanks
Andy

 

[Tony Jollans]

No. Once in the document, text is text. It might be possible to hazard
guesses if there were any unexpected non-text elements included but they
would only be guesses.

I believe there are applications which analyse content and style (and
compare against other texts) to try to expose plagiarism but I couldn't
point you to any.

 

[Ed]

Actually, checking the Style of suspect paragraphs might be a good start.
Every time I've copied something off the 'Net (personal use only, mind you),
it pastes in with a Style attached that is usually not the document's style.
I can apply font and paragraph formatting over the Style, but the underlying
Style is still there. Unless it was pasted in using "Special: Unformatted
Text" - the it will take on the formatting and Style of the paragraph where
it's pasted.

Ed