Ability to track and display changes in Rich Text document

madduck

Hello,

We love CryptPad for its security, the simplicity of the tools, and that it provides us with a nice suite of collaborative tools. Thanks to everyone involved for making such great software.

One problem we're having authoring larger Rich Text documents is that while changes are being tracked in the history, it would be really beneficial to be able to track changes in the same way that people are used to from e.g. Libreoffice and Google Docs etc..

What I mean is that deletions and additions should be highlights, until they are merged. E.g. the following:

Screenshot

Without this, the Markdown editor is really not usable in our team, because it's just what people are used to.

Is this something that's possible?

AlexQ

Questions please @madduck :.

a) You tagged the posting with the "Rich Text" app.
Does your feature request concern the Rich Text app or the Code / Markdown app or both?
I ask because technically they are different, so the solution would also be different.

b) Since the CryptPad team may not be (fully) familiar with the approach of LibreOffice and GoogleDocs (I am not): Is the goal a highlighting of added / delted text as in your screenshot or is this dependent on the author, if multiple authors (more than 2) have made change? I ask because of the degree of complexity.

c) Do you already have suggestions how such an visualization should look? Let me explain: Your screenshot / approach is based on comparing 2 versions, so that it is kind of a diff. But the current CryptPad history is based on singel steps, so you go back and forth in time, so there are not 2 versions to compare but many. Unless you compare step n and n+1, but I don't think that this is your goal, since this would usally result only in a few changed bytes.

All in all I really believe that CryptPad needs a more sophisticated visualization of author changes, but I'm puzzled how to reach this goal. The idea is simple and logical, but the implementation is puzzling me. Also I guess that more details raise the chances for implementation.

My personal opinion:

I don't mind about Rich Text because to me it's unclear if it will always exist in parallel to the Doc app, when it is out of beta. And beause the Doc app is OnlyOffice I don't think there would be features added by CryptPad team.
I do care much about the Code / Markdown app. This is very different from a word processor and often used for codes, todolists, notes and so on, it's more for "technical" people and those are used to team documents, so here changes fromd ifferent authors are very common and need a clear visualization (which was IMHO really started with the invention of Etherpad).

madduck

AlexQ Thank you for your reply! I will try to answer your questions:

a) For me, this is only relevant to Rich Text. I suppose tracked edits like I showed in the screenshot could be classified as diffs, but I think they are different too: diffs are generated by comparing two versions of code. The second version is usually created by a coder who runs tests and experiments, then generates a diff. In the context of document co-authoring, changes are no transactional/atomic like that. I might correct a spelling error here, and add a sentence there, as I read through the doc, and I want to change these "right there". Tracking my changes and then highlighting those changes makes it easier for others to follow these modifications.

See how for each change, author and timestamp are tracked and available by hovering over a change?

b) My Screenshot was made with Libreoffice. Here, indeed, you get a random colour assigned so that when multiple people make changes, these appear with different colours. I am pretty sure there is a way to assign colours such that they don't conflict with existing colours in the document. One could look into how Libreoffice does it.

c) It would be possible to extend the history function to be able to visualise the differences between two points in time in the history of a document.
However, this would actually not quite get us to Tracked Changes like Libreoffice allows. Because in Libreoffice, making a change while Tracking is on is also a bit like making a suggestion. In the above screenshot, I "suggest" to replace the word "text" with "poem". Anyone editing the document can right-click on the change and accept or reject it:

Image description

Moreover, there is a "Manage Changes" dialog allowing me to browse all changes, and accept/reject them individually, or altogether:

Image description

Does this clarify things a bit? If not, here are two links that explain the functionality in Libreoffice a bit more:

Regarding your "personal opinions":

I am indeed talking about the Rich Text editor. If that is on its way out and eventually, the Doc app from OnlyOffice will replace it, then all good, because Doc can already do it:
Yes, I think this could also be beneficial to the Markdown editor, which I love using (but I deal with less technical folks, so it's not an option for us). Note that Etherpad does highlight additions, but cannot do deletions last I checked.

AlexQ

Notes (also for myself):

Rich Text app is an integrated CKEditor 4.x
CKEditor 4.23+ is kind of "end of life" (updates only with LTS license)
CKEditor 5.x is GPL2
- but requires code rewrite
- self hosting requires commercial license otherwise restricted to 1000 loads / per month (I could not find out or understand how self hosting gets prohibited under GPL2)
therefore the CryptPad team seems to search a new editor and so feature requests for the Rich Text app (CKEditor) are likely "stopped"

Links

madduck

I just discovered that Doc is actually a component in CryptPad, just not on the instance I was using. https://notes.dunst.be/ has it, and that is OnlyOffice, which does the tracking properly. So I guess I will just look into hosting a CryptPad instance with Doc.