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Re: DocBook and CVS



>Uh, what does the Solaris diffmk utility do, exactly? I've never heard
>of it.

It's used to add annotations which flag the differences between troff
files, via the .mc (change mark) macro.  It's quite useful.

This is actually one of the sorts of things I look forward to with going
back to DocBook for documents, and away from WYSIWYG editors: the ability
to post-process text.  With this ability, you can do things like produce
documents which accurately, completely, (and automatically!) flag the
changes between arbitrary revisions.  Otherwise, you have to rely on the
author having clicked the "turn on change bars" button before they changed
ANYTHING in the file.  (Good Luck.)  And in most cases, even then you can
only see the changes between incremental rather than arbitrary versions of
a file.

>I named it 'diffmk' because it's a "diff maker". In retrospect, it
>was probably a poor choice.
Well, considering how similar in functionality it is to the command it 
collided with ("diff marker" vs. "diff maker") your thoughts were
certainly close to someone else's. :-)

					m@

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>From a local solaris box:

User Commands                                           diffmk(1)

NAME
     diffmk - mark differences between versions of a troff  input
     file

SYNOPSIS
     diffmk oldfile newfile markedfile

DESCRIPTION
     diffmk compares two versions of a file and creates  a  third
     version  that  includes  "change  mark"  (.mc)  commands for
     nroff(1) and troff(1).  oldfile and newfile are the old  and
     new  versions  of  the  file.   diffmk generates markedfile,
     which, contains the text from newfile with troff(1)  "change
     mark"  requests  (.mc)  inserted  where newfile differs from
     oldfile.  When markedfile is formatted, changed or  inserted
     text  is  shown  by | at the right margin of each line.  The
     position of deleted text is shown by a single *.



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