Issues with document versioning and comparison

[dehuszar]

Hello all.

I am trying to get some information about how the versioning system works in Writer. I've read through the OOoAuthors material on this feature and am left with a few questions.

First, what gets stored into an .odf file when changes are accepted or rejected? Obviously, choosing to include the version history will include the lot, but does accepting and rejecting changes by itself record some history of changes, and/or related authors?

Second and most important, regardless of what gets written to the meta-data, how does one strip out all that information? And does stripping out versioning history also strip out useful meta-data such as formatting and layout?

Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide.

Sincerely,
Sam

[squenson]

dehuszar,

You can find here the description of the .odf format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument. You can also investigate by yourself, as a writer document is a zip file you can easily unzip to see its content, and re-zip later. The process is:
1. Save your file in native Writer format (test.odf)
2. Rename test.odf into test.zip
3. Unzip into test folder
4. Look at the files content.xml and style.xml which contains the content and the formatting with a txt or xml editor.

[dehuszar]

Fair enough. I will poke around, thanks.

Though I was actually asking if there was a way to remove this meta-data from the file via the application interface. There's a lot of folks who will want to be able to clean out this info (especially in a law firm where contracts are being created) without having to crack open the file and manually gut it. I think it is the lack of an easy and visible way to strip out version history is what got Tony Blair in trouble when the British govt. posted the Downing Street Memos. Folks were able to see the redactions in the .doc and were unhappy about what they found.

We're not doing anything of that magnitude or moral flavor, but we do have clients whose contract templates we'd like to reuse without potentially exposing their personal/corporate data to other clients, or opposing parties/counsel.

Is there no tool then that can do this?

[foxcole]

If I'm not mistaken, it works similarly to Word, in which you simply "Save as" to a different file name.

[acknak]

... you simply "Save as" to a different file name.

Doesn't work that way for me (2.3.1). I had to accept/reject all the changes, then save the document.

Likewise, I could not find any menu item for removing the change records, nor anything in the online help.

I seem to remember seeing a warning dialog about removing change information before sending a document, but at least my quick check with File > Send > Document as Email did not trigger a warning, or offer to remove the change records.