Redline
|
Office anthropology™
|
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.”
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”.