Merging Multiple Documents

[stb.]

I have 5 documents that I am trying to put together, some of the items
in several of the documents are the same so I dont want duplicates, or
at least I want to know that I have duplicates and where they are so I
can delete them. Any ideas on the best way to do this? Copy and
paste and manual editing will be rough as the 5 docs together will be
well over 100 pages. Any guidance would be appreciated.

stb.

 

[Word Heretic]

G'day (e-mail address removed) (stb.),

I have a free editioning tool available from the mag section of
www.raycomm.com

You can highlight parts of the document and later specify which
highlights to keep.


Steve Hudson - Word Heretic
Want a hyperlinked index? S/W R&D? See WordHeretic.com

steve from wordheretic.com (Email replies require payment)


stb. reckoned:

 

[Klaus Linke]

I have 5 documents that I am trying to put together, some of the items
in several of the documents are the same so I dont want duplicates, or
at least I want to know that I have duplicates and where they are so I
can delete them. Any ideas on the best way to do this? Copy and
paste and manual editing will be rough as the 5 docs together will be
well over 100 pages. Any guidance would be appreciated.

stb.

I haven't tried Steve's tool; maybe it's better than the hack I thought of:
If you always want to keep just the first time that some paragraph appears,
you could eliminate the duplicate paragraphs further down with a wildcard
search.
In Edit > Find, check "Match wildcards", and then repeatedly use
Find what: (^13[!^13]@)(^13*)\1
Replace with: \1\2
until nothing more is found.

^13 matches some paragraph mark,
[!^13]@ matches any text, as long as it doesn't contain a paragraph mark.
Since the next expression starts with ^13, [!^13]@ here matches the content
of some paragraph.
* can match any text (possibly many, many paragraphs),
and \1 matches some duplicate of the paragraph from the first expression.
Since that last paragraph doesn't appear in "Replace with", it is deleted.

Greetings,
Klaus