[Solved] Comparing Templates

[White Phoenix]

I have come across some old templates that were converted from Word and placed them in my template folder. Two of them seem very similar, but they have completely different dates. I would like to check to see if they are duplicates or have only a few differences between them. I would also like to compare them against the default Text Document template of Writer, but, compared to the spreadsheet templates, the document templates are very complex.

Is there a simple way to compare templates to see what the differences, if any, are?

[keme]

There is Edit - Compare documents..., but I don't know how well it performs when working on docs converted from MS format. Try it and see. (Template files are more or less identical to document files in storage structure, so the compare will work on both.)

If major differences are indicated, it may not be as serious as reported.
Potentially, small original differences could amount to a lot after conversion. (Like an object option/property difference in the original file, causing conversion to two different object types.)
Subsequent manual inspection may be required, but then the reported differences give you a guide, so you know what to inspect.

[RoryOF]

As an OpenOffice template of type .ott is an archive, investigating it outside of OpenOffice will require that the archive be expanded (use Winzip or 7Zip or similar). There is a Windows utility Windiff.exe which will compare two files or two folders to see how they match up. You could extract the two templates to separate folders and point Windiff at them. It may not be quite as simple as that, but it should start you.

Instructions for Windiff are at
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/159214

[White Phoenix]

Thank you for your response.

I have been working on the inelegant solution of writing out sample text lines for each one-line format (such as signature) and a sample paragraph with the name of the sample in the first line. Then I saved the sample paragraph while in the default format of the default OpenOffice text document template. Then for each format I changed the line telling me what it was testing in each paragraph and changed its format. I didn’t see the need to do all formats as I could see that formats like the list series and number series had only a change in indentation.

Then I copied and pasted into new documents each based on a different template to test. Then I compared each document against the default OO.o template document. It took a couple of days, but I was able to see what the differences were and how much they differed from each other. Two only were different in their margin settings and otherwise similar to the default that comes with OpenOffice. A third had some paragraphs with definite changes and also three custom formats. Now that I have this information, I decided to make a new template based on the one that was the most different from the other Word templates and the default.

Too bad I didn’t remember WinDiff, as I have the program archived on an external drive. But then I didn’t know about the OTT files being archive files.

The first suggestion didn’t work, because it compares the text, but not the formatting.