compare-documents

compare-documents is a command-line application that runs the "Compare" tool in Microsoft Word against two documents. This should support user-friendly diffs of Word documents using the excellent track changes tool, while abstracting a fairly clunky GUI interaction.

My purpose in creating this tool is to speed up the generation of changesets from versioned plaintext (e.g. git revisions of scholarly markdown, processed with pandoc) that are digestible to Microsoft Word users.

The CLI currently works only on Mac OS, using AppleScript automation. However, I would be interested in pull requests integrating an alternative (likely COM-based) backend for Windows, wrapped in the same API.

Usage

compare-documents [OPTIONS...] base_doc changed_doc

OPTIONS
  --output/-o      Output merged file (if not specified, file is
                   left open in GUI.
  --keep-open/-k   If output file is written, keep it open
  --author/-a      Author for revisions (defaults to configured
                   value for Microsoft Word).

  base_doc         Path to base document for comparison
  changed_doc      Path to document with changes