Add-on for Creating Synopses in LibreOffice Writer

Anyone who has ever collaborated on a long document is familiar with the problem: A draft passes through five people’s hands, each makes changes, and in the end you’re left with a document full of colorful strikethroughs and no longer know what should actually go into the final version.

For meetings, you need something else—a side-by-side comparison. On the left, what was previously in effect. On the right, what should be in effect going forward. Unfortunately, LibreOffice Writer doesn’t support the creation of such side-by-side comparisons. This add-on fills that gap.

What it does

It takes a document with tracked changes and generates a new document with a table: the original version on the left, the changes on the right. What the right-hand side looks like depends on how many people have contributed.

With two or three contributors, each person gets their own column. This column doesn’t just list what that person edited, but the complete text that would apply if only their changes were adopted. That might sound like a minor detail, but it’s the real benefit: you don’t see snippets of changes, but readable text suggestions that you can compare side by side.

With five or six contributors, the layout becomes too cramped. For that, there’s a second mode where all versions appear one below the other in a single column—and for each paragraph, only the people who actually made changes there are listed. For a single paragraph, that’s usually one or two people. The remaining four would otherwise contribute identical copies of the text.

The final version should show the wording that’s to be adopted. So no strikethrough text—otherwise, you’re just reading a change log again. However, if you simply delete the removed text, the deletion is invisible. A sentence becomes shorter, and no one notices.

The solution lies in distinguishing between three cases. If text is directly replaced by other text, it is sufficient to highlight the new version. If an entire section is omitted without replacement, the word “omitted” appears in italics and strikethrough in that cell instead of an empty cell. And if only part of a sentence is deleted, the last remaining word before it and the first word after it are highlighted in bold — the break becomes visible without tearing the sentence apart:

In this sentence, the middle part, which isn’t actually needed, is omitted.

becomes

In this sentence, the middle part is omitted.

You can see at a glance where something is missing, yet you still read a complete sentence.

Side-by-side comparison of two documents without track changes

Unfortunately, the typical scenario in practice is different: Someone sends a revised file without having track changes enabled. Two files, and no one knows what has changed.

There’s a second feature for this. It lists the open documents; you select which is the source version and which is the final version, and you get the same side-by-side comparison. The comparison is a two-step process: first, the paragraphs are matched up, then each paragraph pair is compared word for word. If a paragraph has been omitted, the right column remains empty; if one has been added, the left column is empty.

Availability

The extension operates entirely locally, does not establish any network connections, and requires nothing other than LibreOffice. The source code and a ready-to-use package are available in the repository; installation involves running unopkg add or double-clicking the .oxt file.

If you try it out, feedback on documents where the mapping is incorrect is especially welcome. Especially with heavily reworded texts, paragraph mapping is a matter of judgment, and the correct settings can only be determined using real-world examples.

Download

Git repository: LibreOffice Writer Synopsis Generator add-on