Word Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 41 Swap Revision Authors

This hack shows you how to edit the information
Word stores when you edit a document using the Track Changes
feature.

In addition to marking revisions in a
document, Word's Track Changes feature remembers who
made the revisions. It lets you view up to eight different revision
authors in a single document, each of whose changes are displayed in
a different color.

Select ToolsOptions and click the Track Changes tab to modify how Word displays revisions.

But what if you want to modify the name of the author of a particular
set of revisions? For example, say you took some work home for the
weekend and accidentally did your editing while logged into your
computer as one of your kids. Now all your revisions appear as though
your teenage son made the changes. Many coworkers would be forgiving,
but a client would hardly look kindly on this error.

Unfortunately, you can't modify a revision author
from VBA. It does have a Revision object with an
Author property, but the property is read-only,
meaning you can't give it a different value.

To make the change, you'll need to get the document
into a format that takes it out of Word's control,
such as RTF (Rich Text Format). When you save a
document as an RTF file, you retain the revision information. You can
then edit the RTF file with any standard text editor, such as
Notepad.

Here's how to change the author of a set of
revisions in a Word file.

First, select FileSave As and choose Rich Text Format in
the "Save as type" field to save
the file as an .rtf file. Next, open the file
with a text editor such as Notepad.

You can find many free text editors available on the Internet with a lot more to offer than Notepad. Check out http://www.crimsoneditor.com for one such free editor.

To locate the part of the file that contains the names of the
revision authors, do a search in the file for the following:

{\*\revtbl

You will see a list of revision authors following the string
characters, as shown in Figure 4-22. The first entry
in the list is always Unknown, which you should
leave as is. If you edit any of the other names in the list, all
revisions attributed to that name will show the change when you open
the document in Word.

Figure 4-22. The list of revision authors inside an RTF file

After you make the change to the RTF file, save it, and then open it
in Word. You can now select FileSave As and return it to
the native .doc format.

Be careful when you edit the RTF file. Word (and any other program that reads RTF files) is very sensitive to the correct positioning of those braces. Make sure you don't accidentally delete one of the braces when you edit the name. If you do, Word may not be able to open the file.

4.16.1 Hacking the Hack

Editing RTF files by hand is tricky business. If you regularly swap
revision authors in a document, a Perl script can take over the dirty
work.

You can download Perl for a Windows machine for free from http://www.activestate.com.

The following script requires the RTF::Tokenizer
module. If you use the ActiveState distribution of Perl, you can use
the Perl Package Manager, available from the ActivePerl entry on your
Start menu, to install RTF::Tokenizer.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Getopt::Long;
use RTF::Tokenizer;
my %opts = ( );
GetOptions (\%opts, 'from=s', 'to=s');
my $filename = shift;
die "Please provide an rtf file to parse.\n" unless $filename;
my $tokenizer = RTF::Tokenizer->new( file => $filename);
while( my ( $type, $arg, $param ) = $tokenizer->get_token( ) ){
last if $type eq 'eof';
if($type eq 'control' and $arg eq 'revtbl') {
my $match = 0;
put($type, $arg, $param) if $opts{from} and $opts{to};
my $brace = 1;
while($brace > 0){
my @attr = $tokenizer->get_token( );
$brace++ if $attr[0] eq 'group' and $attr[1] == 1;
$brace-- if $attr[0] eq 'group' and $attr[1] == 0;
if( $attr[0] eq 'text') {
$attr[1] =~ s/;$//;
if( $opts{from} and $opts{to} ){
if( $opts{from} eq $attr[1] ) {
$attr[1] = $opts{to};
$match = 1;
}
$attr[1] .= ';';
put( @attr);
} else {
print $attr[1], "\n" unless $attr[1] eq 'Unknown';
}
} else {
put(@attr) if $opts{from} and $opts{to};
}
}
if($opts{from} and $opts{to} and !$match) {
print STDERR "The author $opts{from} was not found 
in the document!\n";
}
} else {
put($type, $arg, $param) if $opts{from} and $opts{to};
}
}
sub put {
my ($type, $arg, $param) = @_;
if( $type eq 'group' ) {
print $arg == 1 ? '{' : '}';
} elsif( $type eq 'control' ) {
print "\\$arg$param"; 
} elsif( $type eq 'text' ) {
print "\n$arg"; 
}
}

Save the script as "authorswap.pl"
and put it in the same folder as the RTF file. Run it at a DOS prompt
without any arguments to get a list of the revision authors in the
document, as shown below:

> perl authorswap.pl MyDoc.rtf
> Brett Johnson
Rael Dornfest

To replace one revision author with another, use the
to and from options, as shown
below. Place the names inside quotation marks.

> perl authorswap.pl -from "Brett Johnson" -to
 "Bob Smith" MyDoc.rtf > NewFile.rtf

The file NewFile.rtf will reflect the changes.

Andrew Savikas and Andy Bruno