DocBook Comparison

DocBook Compare enables you to compare two versions of a DocBook file, producing a new DocBook file marked with revisionflag attributes wherever changes have occurred. It performs a detailed XML-level comparison and automatically adds revision markup to highlight additions, deletions, and modifications.

What DocBook Compare does

DocBook Compare highlights changes between two DocBook files using either DocBook's own revision flag scheme or editor-specific tracked change formats. The marked-up output can be further processed with DocBook XSL customisations to produce HTML or XSL-FO output with visual change highlighting — including change bars in printed output.

Output formats

Format	Description
DocBook Markup (default)	Uses `revisionflag` attribute: `added`, `deleted`, `changed`
Arbortext Tracked Changes	Arbortext Change Tracking Markup Specification
FrameMaker Tracked Changes	Adobe FrameMaker tracked change format
oXygen Tracked Changes	oXygen processing instructions for tracked changes
XMetaL Tracked Changes	XMetaL tracked change elements

Key constraints

Only documents of the same DocBook type can be compared (book vs book, article vs article).
DocBook 4 cannot be compared against DocBook 5 when the DocBook 5 input uses the DocBook namespace.