Similarity and/or Diff of two ODT documents (Linux)

Question

I have two ODT documents, they have very close contents, I want to compare them to see how similar they are.

The best would be to have a similarity percentage, if not possible, an alternative would be at least to have some sort of diff.

I am running Ubuntu Lucid.

Solution:

I used odt2txt to convert the files to text, then used wdiff -i --statistics one.txt two.txt to have a diff along with statistics which gave me the percentage of common words (similarity).

sleske · Answer 1 · 2021-01-12T08:36:38.527

29

Did you try the built-in compare functionality? Edit -> Track Changes -> Compare Document....

If you just want a textual diff, your best bet is probably to convert both documents to plain text, then run a regular diff on them. You will have to figure out how to normalize linebreaks though, otherwise the diff will not be very useful.

edited Jan 12 '21 at 08:36

answered Jul 13 '10 at 02:08

sleske

23,525

score 8 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 14 '21 at 18:35

8

I haven't tried them myself but this pair of tools - odt2txt and oodiff - looks promising.

edited Mar 14 '21 at 18:35

Torello

103

answered Jul 11 '10 at 15:46

JRobert

7,134

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 11 '10 at 16:50

1

If you don't care about text formatting, you may as well copy the contents to plaintext files and use good old diff.

ps: Are you a teacher looking for possible cheaters ? :p

answered Jul 11 '10 at 16:50

tamtakos

171

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 03 '14 at 13:59

1

The way I do this is to produce .pdf files with libreoffice and then use diffpdf to compare the two pdf files. This shows the differences highlighted in parallel windows

answered Jan 03 '14 at 13:59

Peter Allott

11

Similarity and/or Diff of two ODT documents (Linux)

4 Answers4