Everything you need for managing changing DITA documents. Compare and merge your DITA files.

While DITA Compare works within the structure of your files to identify real change, DITA Merge applies sophisticated rules for automated merging so you don’t have to worry about missing a difference.

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Everything you need for managing changing DITA

The DeltaDITA package includes:

DITA Compare

Unlike line by line comparison tools, DITA Compare works within the structure of your files to identify real change. It then generates output files that are structured in the same way as your original files or in user-friendly HTML reports.

DITA Merge

Merge multiple DITA files while identifying the change between them. Apply sophisticated rules that automatically accepts change depending on your configuration or markups change for further attention.

Configure to find the changes you need to know about

DeltaDITA’s algorithms work through each of your files in turn, examining their structure to match-up all the corresponding elements with the original.

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You decide which changes to keep

Display the changes from DITA Compare or DITA Merge in an XML editor to manually accept or reject changes. Or apply custom rules to automatically determine whether to accept the changes or mark them up in the output file as unresolved changes.

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Show the difference in a way that makes sense to you

The results are passed through a pipeline so you can transform the DITA into whatever form is required by your systems or processes. This is all managed through the DeltaDITA’s API.

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Compare and merge your own DITA files

If you’re wanting to see all DeltaDITA has to offer book a one-to-one demo with a DeltaXML developer.

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Ready to integrate into your products or processes

Accessed through Java or REST APIs integrate into any enterprise workflow or content management system.

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Tracking moves within your DITA content

When editing documents it’s commonplace to move chunks of content from one location to another. In these circumstances, it can be useful to understand that this was a move operation rather than a deletion and an addition. DITA Compare uses element ids to identify this type of change and mark it as a move so that you have the option to style it differently if needed.

Text formatting intelligence

DeltaDITA handles structural markup like b and i and semantic inline markup such as cite and term with specific processing so that the focus is on content change without any adverse effects from formatting. The list of elements to handle is fully configurable, allowing you to add or remove elements from our predefined list or replace the whole list with your own.

Integrate a more stable GIT merge solution

Version control systems such as Git typically use a line-based tool for merging content during a branch merge. If you’re having issues with invalid DITA following a Git merge using DITA Merge as the merge tool can save you a lot of time spent on conflict resolution.

See our GIT workflow DITA Merge sample →

Find the change that matters to you, ignore the diffs that don’t

Comparison results can be configured to show in any form you need, whether for automated processing or human review.

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DITA goes in, DITA comes out just as you’d expect

There’s no need to change your existing DITA publication workflows for DITA Compare. The comparison process is tailored specifically for DITA content producing valid DITA output, where changes are marked using native DITA markup. Elements are marked with the @status and @rev attributes and text changes are wrapped in elements (or pre-DITA 1.3) to enable the change markup to be applied at the word level.

Automatic or manual change resolution

When the aim of a merge is to reach a new version of a document, you’re often only interested in reviewing the conflicting changes. DITA Merge allows you to automatically ‘accept’ changes that don’t conflict, only marking up those that are in conflict. This reduces the time needed to review the result. Of course if you do want to review all differences between the documents, including those which don’t conflict, that’s still possible. In fact you can determine which changes should be included in the result using our rule-based processing feature.

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Compare CALS and HTML tables with ease

DITA tables are complex enough without having to worry about how to compare them. We process CALS and HTML tables to make sure that the results are valid against the table models while still delivering accurate comparisons and merging.

DeltaXML provided us with a straightforward way of integrating a rich document comparison feature into our SaaS platform. We spent some time researching the market and found DeltaXML was by far the best product on the market in terms of functionality and robustness.

Niels Montanana
Chief Operating Officer, Scribestar Limited

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When change in DITA is a standard

 

Publish redline documents

When you publish documents, like standards, that are relied on as a key part of your customers’ work it can be difficult for them to manage the transition to an updated version. Many customers, including standards bodies (international, national and industry-specific), use DeltaXML’s products to drive a redline document workflow. DITA Compare identifies the changes between publication versions, marks them in the source XML and the resulting output feeds into the usual publication workflow where styling is added to changed content to help your customers to understand exactly what updates appear in this latest revision.

Gathering changes from multiple editors or reviewers

When it comes to reviewing documentation, combining the suggested edits or comments from multiple reviewers can be a time-consuming task. You could make sure that only one person at a time is allowed to make review changes but even then, how do you know who made which changes? To speed things up, DITA Merge enables a concurrent reviewing process. After sending a document out to as many reviewers as you like, DITA Merge will merge the reviewed versions back together into a single document, allowing you to see where multiple people suggested the same changes, where there are conflicting changes, and where simple changes have been made.

Review document updates

Reviewing document updates can be an onerous task, particularly when the documents are large. The task becomes much easier if you can see exactly what has changed since the last time the document was reviewed. DITA Compare identifies changes between two specific revisions, allowing you to produce a version specifically for reviewers that highlights the precise changes that you want them to review. Because it operates on the source XML there is no need for change tracking and you have the flexibility to edit and review on different platforms. If your reviewer is familiar with XML editors, DITA Compare can even generate PIs to show the changes it identified as if they were track changes in a range of popular tools.

Frequently Asked Questions

DeltaDITA is a package consisting of the toolkits DITA Compare and DITA Merge. While DITA Compare finds all of the meaningful changes between any two XML files, DITA Merge recombines multiple DITA documents or datasets into a single file.

Both DITA Compare and DITA Merge are optimised for integration into any enterprise workflow and content management systems. All of their functionality is accessed through Java or REST APIs, which are fully documented and come with complete, working examples. On top of these API’s we have created plugins for popular XML authoring tools, including oXygen and FrameMaker for seamless content authoring and reviewing.

Yes. DeltaDITA can be configured to tell you about the differences that matter to you and ignore those that don’t, including changes to attributes, the order of content, differences in whitespace and external links.

With DITA Merge sophisticated rules enable you to reference any aspect of the XML structure and attributes, to specify where conflicts may be automatically resolved and what should take priority. Rules may reference authors and editors, specific positions within the document tree and even table elements.

DeltaDITA works at the map or topic level, bringing comparison functionality for reusable components or complete documents.

Rather than comparing line-by-line, it identifies and matches up all the elements across your DITA content within the document context. This pairing process uses a combination of element names, parent names, position in the XML tree and the structure of child elements to provide you with an easily understandable and accurate comparison result.

DeltaDITA outputs well-formed, valid DITA files so the resulting output is compatible with your existing DITA tools. It has been designed to make all your content changes easy to work with. Where this involves tables, a sophisticated process works out the best way of showing all the changes, while still generating a valid table.

With DITA Merge any changes which cannot be merged automatically are marked up clearly in the DITA code for post processing review.

So you’re only paying for what you need we offer a range of license models dependent on the system architecture you’re using and your current use case. Fill in our get a quote form to receive more details on your pricing options.

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If you need assistance with a product evaluation or you’re a customer with a technical question about any of our products please head over to our support portal.

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