Quick View / Diffs and/or Updated Sections

[cgreene]

As this work is being updated, it would be convenient to show which sections have been updated. This ranges in complexity:

• Label section headers in some way.
• Adjust the style for paragraphs that have not been changed.
• Provide a form of visual diff.

We'll probably have to get some form of visual diff working to submit the paper, but we can probably do that using a build of the word version from 2018 and the new one with the compare documents feature.

[cgreene]

@dhimmel / @vincerubinetti : I'm curious as to your thoughts on what here is easy vs hard. I have some thoughts but less expertise, so I'd love to get your read before I bias you :)

[dhimmel]

Are you okay with a manual approach, where manually mark sections that have been updated? Or are you looking for an automated approach to show the actual diff?

As far as showing which sections have changed, we could highlight the headers, perhaps with two levels for completely new and revised.

[vincerubinetti]

As for the style, I'd probably take a lot of cues right from Github, with the colors and the layout. I don't think it would be too difficult from a CSS standpoint.

But if you're looking for an automated approach, as Daniel said, that would be significantly harder.

[cgreene]

At the moment I'm not opposed to either type of approach, but if we're going manual it will be better to implement sooner rather than later.

[vincerubinetti]

For indicating what paragraphs and sections have changes, what about something like this:

This should be easy using manubot's built-in color classes and arbitrary html element styling.

[vincerubinetti]

I'm not sure what level of detail you want to go down to. Like within a paragraph, do you want to show the sentences/words that have changed. And do you also need to show the old versions too.

I could make extra CSS classes that would make this easier.

[cgreene]

I think the section or paragraph would be nifty. I don't think we need to show the old version. Tagging @agitter to see what he thinks.

[agitter]

Paragraph and section header highlighting would be a great start. That would primarily be a deep review-specific feature that would be useful to show what parts of the manuscript have not been updated at a coarse level.

I like the idea of using GitHub's style as much as possible. Could this highlighting be toggled on and off?

Automating the highlighting would be a cool feature. If none of us have time to implement that, manual annotations will work.

Longer term, I'm still interested in word level rich diffs (https://github.com/manubot/rootstock/issues/54). However, we can get away with something simpler here.