Multiple copies of contents

Somehow, three copies of my fairly long file have appeared, with different dates but mostly the same content, as though I was updating them at random times. I don’t know how this happens, but it’s very troublesome to create a single version with all updates included — I’m going to have to print them all out and compare them in detail. How can I avoid this happening again? Does this mean there are muliple copies of the software? Eleanor

You can use a diff tool to pretty quickly find the differences between the files. There are lots of tools that will do this for you, hear’s one that I use sometimes:

https://neil.fraser.name/software/diff_match_patch/demos/diff.html

To use it:

  1. Past text content of one document into Text Version 1
  2. Past text content of other document into Text Version 2
  3. Click the “Compute Diff” button towards the end of the screen

That should be a lot easier then printing them out and trying to find differences by eye.

Sorry I’m not entirely sure what would cause this. Are these stored on Dropbox? What are the exact file names? I don’t think it means that you have multiple copies of TaskPaper installed. A single copy of TaskPaper can open/save many different documents.

Thanks for this! However, I got a great deal of output. Is there any way to save it to a file so I can study it?

Eleanor

Jesse, I took a closer look at the output, and I don’t understand it. I thought that lines which are different between the two files would appear, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I have a printout of the input and output of the beginning of the file, is there anyway I can send you the image? Eleanor

This tool shows all text… if there are no changes the text is normal… insertions are colored green, deletions are colored red.

Yeah I’d be happy to take a look, my email is jesse@hogbaysoftware.com