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Track Changes Limitations

There are some inherent limitations to the Change Tracking feature. These limitations include the following:
  • Limitations to rejected changes - Recording changes has limitations and there is no guarantee that rejecting all changes will return the document exactly to its original state.
  • Limitations to hierarchical changes - Recorded changes are not hierarchical, a change cannot contain other changes inside. For example, if you delete an insertion made by another user, then reject the deletion, the information about the author who made the previous insertion is not preserved.
  • Limitations to using certain actions - Some actions cannot be implemented with the Track Changes feature enabled. For example, some table-related actions (Delete Row(s), Delete Column(s), Join Cells, Split Cell) ignore the Track Changes feature.
  • Possible Serialization Limitation - If you have equivalent adjacent tracked changes, for example, you see two back-to-back changes in the Review pane that have identical properties (the same user, timestamp, content, etc.), when you save the document, it is sometimes possible for the document to only contain a single processing instruction.

DITA-Specific Track Changes Limitations

  • When presenting cross references or related links in the Author visual editing mode, if the link target element has a title that contains change tracking, the presented link reference content is shown as if all tracked changes in the target element's title have been accepted.
  • When presenting phrases with key references in the Author visual editing mode, if the defined key has a keyword that contains change tracking, the presented referenced keyword reference content is shown as if all track changes inside it have been accepted.

Publishing-Specific Track Changes Limitations

  • Deletion Change Tracking Limitation - When displaying tracked changes in published outputs (for example, when enabling the show.changes.and.comments DITA parameter in WebHelp and PDF publications), the deleted content will be presented as plain XML with the tag names serialized as plain text. Key references and content key references are also not resolved in the presented deleted content.