Flexible Diff-ing in a collaborative writing system

Abstract

An important activity in collaborative writing is communicating about changes to texts,, This paper reports on a software system, ji'exible cliff, that finds and reports differences ("cliffs") between versions of texts. The system is flexible, allowing users to control several aspects of its operation including what changes are reported and how they are shown when they are reported. We argue that such flexibility is necessary to support users' different social and cognitive needs.