Comments and tracked changes

Comments

• Insert › Comment (⇧ ⌘ K) puts a comment on the selected text.
• Commented text is highlighted in yellow (on screen only) and a mark in the right margin of the page opens the comment box, with author, date and text. You edit or delete it there.
• The author is the name of the Mac user.

Comments are kept in DOCX and ODT and read from those written in Word and LibreOffice. The comment’s plain text is kept, not its formatting or replies. In RTF, DOC and plain text, comments are lost.

Tracking changes

Edit › Tracked Changes › Track Changes (⇧ ⌘ E) turns tracking on for the document; the status bar shows it, and a click on the notice turns it off.

With tracking on:

• typed, pasted or dragged text is an insertion, underlined in the author’s color;
• deleted or replaced text stays, struck through;
• a formatting change (bold, font, color, style…) is marked with the previous formatting;
• deletions of whole paragraphs and table rows are tracked too.

Deleting your own text you just inserted really removes it. Changes the app makes by itself, such as updating a table of contents, are not tracked. Hovering over a change shows who made it and when; the marks also show in print, as in Word.

Accepting and rejecting

From the Edit › Tracked Changes menu or the context menu:

• Accept Change and Reject Change: the ones in the selection, or the one at the cursor;
• Accept All Changes and Reject All Changes;
• Next Change and Previous Change to step through them.

Each command undoes in a single step.

Compatibility

• In DOCX, tracked changes are read and written like Word’s.
• In ODT, a formatting change saved by LibreOffice can only be accepted, because ODF doesn’t save the previous formatting (Documenta adds it to its own files). Paragraph changes saved in ODT reopen in Documenta, while LibreOffice shows them as formatting changes; a deletion across several paragraphs becomes a single paragraph.
• In RTF, DOC, plain text and exports, the text is kept with all changes accepted.