Method of compound document comparison

• US 20080301193A1
• Filed: 05/30/2006
• Published: 12/04/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 01/29/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Litera Technology LLC
• Original Assignee: Litera Technology LLC
• Inventors: Massand, Deepak
• Granted Patent: US 7,818,660 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/200
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/258 Data format conversion from or to a database
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/33 Querying
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/194 Calculation of difference between files

Abstract

A method and system for comparing compound documents. An original compound document and a modified compound document are analyzed to determine and mark the location of embedded objects. A comparison is performed between an original primary document and the modified primary document, ignoring the embedded objects, the output of which is a comparison output document. The embedded objects are compared by copying the contents of the embedded objects to compatible documents, comparing the embedded object from the original compound document and the embedded object from the modified compound document, the output of which is inserted into the comparison output document using the location markers of the embedded objects.

Claims

1. A method of comparing compound documents, comprising:

examining at least one of the compound documents for OLE objects;

in the event an OLE object is discovered, copying the discovered OLE objects from the compound documents to be compared to a documents of the type corresponding to an application that created the object to create OLE object comparison documents;

initiating a comparison engine to compare the OLE objects copied into the OLE object comparison documents, wherein the output of the comparison engine is a comparison output OLE object document;

placing comparison output OLE object document in a comparison output document; and

initiating the comparison of the primary compound documents, wherein the output the comparison of the primary compound documents is included in the comparison output document.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein primary comparison document is a Word document.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein copying the discovered OLE object to a document of the type that may be opened by the application that created the object.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein placement of the comparison output OLE object document in the comparison output document is performed in accordance with OLE object location information retrieved from the comparison documents.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein at least one of the OLE objects embedded in the comparison documents is excluded from comparison.

6. The method of claim 5, wherein the exclusion of the at least one of the OLE objects embedded in the comparison documents is in response to a command from a user of a document application.

7. The method of claim 5, wherein exclusion of the at least one of the OLE objects embedded in the comparison documents is according to the document type of the OLE object.

8. A method of comparing documents, comprising:

examining at least one of the documents to be compared to determine if it contains objects from another document type,

in the event the document to be compared contains at least one object;

marking the location of the discovered object, and

copying the discovered objects to a document of a type corresponding to the document type of the object to create discovered object comparison documents;

comparing the primary documents of the documents to be compared;

generating a comparison output document from the results of the comparison of the primary documents of the documents to be compared;

comparing the discovered object comparison documents with a comparison engine that corresponds to document type of the discovered objects; and

inserting the results of the comparison of the discovered object comparison documents in the comparison output document according to the marked location of the discovered object.

displaying the result using chosen format options of color, underline, bold, italics etc. As an example all additions to be shown as blue, double underline and deletions to be shown as red strikethrough

9. The method of claim 8, further comprising:

in the event multiple objects are discovered in the documents to be compared;

copying discovered objects of a first document type to a document of a type corresponding to the document type of the object to create first type discovered object comparison documents;

copying discovered objects of a second document type to a document of a type corresponding to the document type of the object to create second type discovered object comparison documents;

comparing the first type discovered object comparison documents with a comparison engine that corresponds to the first document type;

inserting the results of the comparison of the first type discovered objects in the comparison output document at a location corresponding to the marked information of the first type discovered object;

comparing the first type discovered object comparison documents with a comparison engine that corresponds to the first document type; and

inserting the results of the comparison of the second type discovered objects in the comparison output document at a location corresponding to the marked information of the second type discovered object.

10. A method if comparing documents, comprising:

receiving at least two documents for comparison;

marking the location of objects embedded in the received documents;

copying at least one of the embedded objects to a object comparison documents;

comparing the primary documents of the at least two input documents;

creating a comparison output document from the results of the comparison of the primary documents of the at least two input documents;

comparing the object comparison documents; and

inserting the results of the comparison of the object comparison documents into the comparison output document.

11. The method of claim 10, wherein the results of the comparison of the object comparison documents into the comparison output document are inserted according to the marked location of objects embedded in the received documents.

12. The method of claim 10 wherein the embedded objects are copied into an object comparison document which corresponds to the document type of the embedded object.

13. The method of claim 12, wherein the embedded objects are copied into an object comparison document of the same document type of the embedded object.

14. The method of claim 13, wherein the primary document type is a Word document.

15. The method of claim 14, wherein at least one of the object document types is from the list of:

Excel document type, PowerPoint document type, Visio document type, PDF document type, pictures in all formats such as JPEG, GIFF, TIFF, PSD, PNG, or BIT MAP etc.

16. The method of claim 10, wherein the results of the comparison are displayed using at least one of chosen format options including color, underline, bold, or italics in the main document type and in at least one of the embedded objects.