Redline
|
Office anthropology™
|
“Comparison is the thief of joy.” — Theodore Roosevelt
One bit of legaltech that legal eagles never had trouble adopting was document comparison software. Over the years this kit has gone by different names: Americans call it “redline”, Brits “blackline” — we think this is a function of relative printer sophistication either side of the Atlantic — and by reference various proprietary brands: Comparite, DeltaView, and Microsoft Word’s built in function, “Track Changes” — but all do the same job to some degree of proficiency: comparing two versions of the same bit of text and “marking them up”.
Here is an extract from Hunter Barkley’s forthcoming Opco Boone novella, Deltaview Force: An Opco Boone Adventure:
Boone fixed A.J. with a hard stare. “All right, kid, in you go. Let’s throw a redline around the immediate area.”
A.J. followed up with a static-mount diff-sensor. He rookie unclipped the stabilisers and set the unit on the floor. He punched in the coordinates and it emitted a sheet of red light.
Okay, everyone hold still now.
The diff-sensor swept for semantic content. A.J. watched the display. The hourglass flipped. It flipped again. After a few moments it rendered: zeroes across the board.
“We’re clean, sir. No material alterations. The text-field is Delta-1 as we left it.”
Boone looked concerned. “Odd. To what significance?”
“To one decimal place, Commander.”
“Okay. Run it to three, soldier.”
The kid re-ran the analytics. The diff binoc whistled and beeped.
A.J. shrugged. “Point nine-nine-seven. As good as clean, sir. You could eat your dinner off that.”
As good as clean, but not clean. Interesting. “Recalibrate it, lad. Let’s go find those missing diffs.”