Greetings all,
My experience is close to Jim's, but I've come across a lot of people who
have had problems with Track Changes. I gather it's unwise to allow more
than one layer of Tracked Changes to exist in a document, because of the
chances of corruption of the document. The Track Changes function can also
interfere with deleting footnotes. Further, there are potential problems in
relation to merged documents.
John McGhie commented in a previous post: "Intrinsically, Tracked Changes
results in extremely complex structures in the document, so you need to edit
carefully with paragraph marks shown. If you do not, you can end up
corrupting the document. It is never a good idea to make changes within
changes: if you do too much of this, document corruption becomes very
likely."
And another comment by John: "A Word document internally is an indescribably
complex rat's nest of binary pointers. Each tracked change sets a heap of
extra pointers, to the beginning and end of the deleted text, and the
beginning and end of the new text. If those pointers occur within pointersŠ
What you end up with is a document that is so complex that Word can't
unravel it. It's a limitation of the Word document format, which was
designed for simpler times when computers were smaller and slower, and so
were documents."
Whenever possible, if it's necessary to see the changes that have occurred,
I get my clients to keep Track Changes off and, when a new version is
received, to choose Tools menu -> Track changes -> Compare documents. This
is done on a Saved As copy, leaving the original unaffected by the file
complexities that Track Changes causes. (If anyone is interested, what I
then do if I don't want all the changes is described under the heading
"Tracking changes, turning off" in my notes on the way I use Word, called
"Bend Word to your Will", downloadable at
www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/WordMac/Bend/BendWord.htm).
I realize that some users, especially in the legal profession, need to be
able to spot all changes, but for every one of those users there are many
more who are simply control freaks. These people can't resist the degree of
control that comes from monitoring their subordinates or consultants via
Track Changes. The problem is, they end up focusing on the minutiae rather
than the thrust of the argument in the document. I try to discourage them;
usually I just give them up as clients.
As to documents becoming confused when different (but maybe similarly named)
fonts are involved, I never have that problem even though nearly all my
documents go cross-platform, mainly because during the document development
phase I use fonts that retain the same pagination on Macs and PCs. The good
oil is in a Microsoft article at:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/wordx/wordx_main.asp?embfpath=featartx&embfname
=wd_crossplatform.asp
Key parts of the article say that despite their similar appearance, the
standard Macintosh TrueType fonts (Times, Helvetica, and Courier) are
actually quite different from the standard Windows fonts (Times New Roman,
Arial, and Courier New). These fonts come from broadly the same font
families, but the font metrics of the font sets are different. Even a very
short document that uses these fonts can exhibit noticeable change in
pagination when you move it to the other platform, and long documents can
display a considerable amount of change. Word for the Macintosh uses
Microsoft¹s TrueType font set for the Macintosh, including Times New Roman,
Arial, Courier New, and Wingdings. These are the same TrueType fonts that
come with Microsoft Windows. This offers a consistent base set of fonts for
every Word user, minimizing font-mapping difficulties when you cross
platforms.
When other fonts are needed for the final product, I just change the font
specification in my underlying styles away from Times New Roman and Arial,
in the final version.
--Clive Huggan
