Word document compare - performance issue in finding revision changes

Aspose.Words Product Family
1

Enhancement Request

When we compare two word documents with lot of content changes in some part of the document, then Aspose compare API is taking lot of time to find those revision changes. Tested with latest Aspose.Words Java API - 15.8 version.


Consider the following attached documents for this use case:
* “ContentChangeTest_SourceDoc.docx” – source document containing 86 pages.
* “ContentChangeTest_TargetDoc.docx” – target document with lot of content changes.
* “ContentChangeTest_Aspose_Comparison_Output.docx” – result of comparing source and target documents by Aspose APIs
* “ContentChangeTest_MS_Word_Tool_Comparison_Output.docx” – result of comparing source and target documents by MS Word compare tool.

Here the Source document contain 86 pages.
Modified 72 pages (page numbers 4 to 76) in the Source document into 114 pages (page numbers 4 to 118) into Target document.
Remaining 14 pages in the Source document didn’t change - they remain intact.

Here are the observations:
- Aspose comparison took “6 mins” whereas MS Word compare tool took just 25 secs.
- The number of revisions given by Aspose is more than those given by MS Word tool.
- MS tool finds some changes as moves.

Aspose output: 10572 revisions - 4234 insertions, 3697 deletions, 2641 formatting changes (Total Aspose 27157 revision objects)
MS Word comparison tool output: 7014 revisions - 2460 insertions, 1986 deletions, 153 moves, 2415 formatting changes

Here the documents are that much large size - they are 300KB, 940KB - less than 1MB size, with around 100 to 150 pages. But though the number of content changes are more between the source and target documents.


Can you please look into this…
If Aspose can improve the performance (reduce time taken) for finding revisions in this case, then that will be nice.
If possible identify the moves and optimize the number of revisions like that of MS Word comparison tool, then it will be nice.

Can you please take a look at this as an enhancement request on your side?

Thanks,
-Satya

2

Hi Satya,

Thanks for your inquiry. I have logged this enhancement request as WORDSNET-12461 in our issue tracking system. Our product team will look into the
possibility of implementation of this feature. Once we have
any information about this enhancement feature, we will update you via this thread.

Edit : MS Word 2013 take around a minute at my side to compare the shared documents.

Please let us know if you have any more queries.

3

The issues you have found earlier (filed as WORDSNET-12461) have been fixed in this Aspose.Words for .NET 16.10.0 update and this Aspose.Words for Java 16.10.0 update.

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4

Thanks for resolving this.

Can you let us know, how much time Aspose takes to compare the attached documents in the issue? How much improvement made by Aspose?

5

Hi Satya,

Thanks for your inquiry. Please note that performance and memory usage all depend on complexity and size of the documents you are generating. We tested the scenario at Windows 7, 8 GB RAM and noticed that Document.Compare method takes around 100 seconds.


The Document comparison has changed to compare at word level rather than at character level. This makes output looks more readable and closer to MS Word. Please check the release notes of Aspose.Words v16.10.0 from here:
Aspose.Words for .NET 16.10.0 Release Notes

6

That’s nice. Thanks for the reply. We will check this out.