[TxMt] Compare text files based on words not lines

[Holger Frauenrath]

On Jan 20, 2007, at 12:14 PM, Christoph Prion wrote:

[...]
> The problem I am trying to solve is that in my field of science
> (molecular biology) MS Word is the de facto standard for exchanging
> manuscripts among collaborators and also submission of manuscripts to
> journals.

[...]

> 1) finding a writing environment  that disregards formatting, is easy
> to learn and easy to read while writing.
> 2) Some kind of support for bibliography tools should be incorporated.
> No hidden field functions that only work (hmm, work...) in some
> versions of Word and screw up everything every now and then. Plain
> text, please.

[...]

> My apologies for the long post. I would appreciate any and all  
> helpful comments
>
> Christoph


Hi Christoph,

don't worry about it. Your question may be off-topic but, I think,  
still interesting to others. At least, I have the same problem, which  
also means that I have no good solution for you. What I am currently  
doing is:

- Write my research proposals and other long documents that are  
supposed to look good in LaTeX, using Textmate/PDFView/BibDesk
- Write my paper manuscripts in MS Word, using EndNote (library  
imported from BibDesk)
- Write my notes and summaries of scientific papers (all things  
needed for future use in articles, reviews, proposals, or as  
introductions for new students) in RTF with basic formatting so that  
I can later reuse these either way (e.g., references in curly  
brackets so that EndNote will recognize them when I copy it to Word,  
and I only have to add \cite when I use it in LaTeX)

Pretty clumsy. And the more complex part of your problem (compare  
files) has been done manually by myself. The use of Markdown was new  
to me, and I only checked it out after you mentioned it in one of  
your last emails. It sure looks interesting.

I would also like to see some helpful comments on this issue.

Best regards
Holger