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Now the scenario is, I write a draft of a spec for some feature, and give each of you a copy and tell you to mark your changes in revisions. Each of you does, and a week later I get back 15 copies of revision-marked documents. How the heck do I turn those into one finished document?
The merge documents feature basically combines all the tracked revisions from the merged documents and dumps them in the proper position in the document which you’ve specified as your working copy. Note that can require a little smarts, e.g., if person #1 changes a word in the original, and person #2 deletes that same word, we need to represent that legibly.
Web considerations: first of all this requires a robust underlying change tracking mechanism. A further problem is that until review, the document is really not fit to be viewed. When one user revises a document with revision marks, you could view it as if changes were accepted and it would probably look pretty good. If you do that after integrating five reviewers, it looks like a jumble. So you have to provide an “original” view in whatever display application you’re using.