The future of education is plain text

Re:The future of education is plain text by mrweasel on Tuesday June 13, 2017 @03:51PM (#14548019)

People look at you like your a damn wizard when you diff two texts to find the differences. I'm sure there are diff tools for Word as well, but almost no one use them, because they aren't aware that such a tool could exist.

The average person run around with a smart phone in their pocket, a marvel of engineering and yet they still don't know how to use their computer to do trivial tasks.

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Re:The future of education is plain text by ferdterguson on Wednesday June 14, 2017 @01:26AM (#14550815)

Word has built in diff. Review -> Compare.

It's kind of slow though in my experience. Diffing plain text is amazing. I recently used it to diff a research paper I was peer reviewing that the TeX source was provided for. I felt like a wizard.

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Re:The future of education is plain text by tincholio on Wednesday June 14, 2017 @01:53AM (#14550877)

If anything, the "track changes" feature in Word is actually nicer than diffing by hand (and this is coming from someone who positively hates Word!).

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Re:The future of education is plain text by FabHK on Thursday June 15, 2017 @11:43AM (#14561431)

Does it track changes in one document (when enabled), or can you give it two documents and let it highlight changes?

(A fairly common occurrence when many people's distributed version control system consists of emailing around "thesis_v0.9.doc", "thesis_v1.0.doc", "thesis_final.doc", "thesis_final_v2.doc", etc. See also: http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1531 )

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