Comparing two documents

Sometimes it is important to find out whether there are any differences – and if so what – between two very similar documents. A useful quick way of doing that is to read down the last word on each line for each page or paragraph of the two documents you are comparing. This gives you random sequences of words that don’t make sense – if they are the same in each case, you can be fairly confident that the two documents are identical. If they diverge at any point, you need to look more closely and see what the differences are.

Here’s a demonstration. There follow two very similar paragraphs.

The notice of appeal characterises this as a failure to find that ‘it was within the range of reasonable responses for Mr Allan to invite Ms Peacock… to assist him with writing his decision.’ That is not a fair account of the tribunal’s criticism. It was of course legitimate for Ms Peacock to assist Mr Allan in writing his decision, and the tribunal did not find otherwise. What the tribunal rightly considered unsatisfactory was the fact that Ms Peacock had written Mr Allan’s decision for him in almost exactly the form in which he delivered it at a time when he claimed not yet to have reached it. This, it is submitted, is a procedural flaw capable alone of removing the process from the ‘band of reasonable responses.’

The notice of appeal characterises this as a failure to find that ‘it was within the range of reasonable responses for Mr Allan to invite Ms Peacock… to assist him with writing his decision.’ That is not a fair account of the tribunal’s criticism. It was of course legitimate for Ms Peacock to assist Mr Allan in writing his decision, and the tribunal did not find otherwise. What the tribunal rightly considered unsatisfactory was the fact that Ms Peacock had written Mr Allan’s decision for him almost exactly as he delivered it at a time when he claimed not yet to have reached it. This, it is submitted, is a procedural flaw capable alone of removing the process from the ‘band of reasonable responses.’

Reading down the right hand side of the first of the pair gives you “reasonable a Allan considered exactly is reasonable responses.” Reading down the right hand side of the second gives you “reasonable a Allan considered as a responses.” That signposts a divergence between the two versions at the 5th line of text.

It’s not a completely accurate method, because it depends on the assumption that any alteration within any given line will change the total length of the line, but for most purposes it provides a good rough and ready check. (It doesn’t work at all, of course, if font size or margins are different in the two versions.)

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