Disclaimer

Not legal advice

A tool that marks an insertion has no view about whether accepting it would be a bad idea. Deciding what a change means, whether it is acceptable, and what to do about it is work only you can do.

What a comparison can miss

Redline Pad compares the two pieces of text you give it, and only those. It knows nothing about the rest of the document they came from, so it cannot tell you that a defined term changed meaning three clauses earlier, that a cross-reference now points somewhere else, or that a deleted sentence is the one another agreement relies on.

Within the text itself, some things are harder to show than others:

• Formatting changes are reported where the tool can see them, but formatting that a word processor stores outside the text — numbering schemes, styles, section properties — does not survive a paste and cannot be compared.
• Text pasted from Word, Outlook or a PDF may arrive differently from how it looked in its original application. The tool never silently discards anything, but it may simplify a construct it cannot represent.
• A large rewrite may be shown as one wholesale replacement rather than as the several smaller changes you had in mind. That is a presentational choice about readability, not a claim that nothing smaller happened.
• Another comparison tool, including Word's own, may present the same two versions differently. Neither is wrong; they are drawing the same difference in different ways.

Check the redline

Treat the output as a starting point for review, not as a finding. Before you rely on a redline — and certainly before you send one to someone else — read it against the two versions it came from.

Redline Pad is provided as-is, without warranty, on the terms of use. If a comparison looks wrong to you, I would like to know: the feedback form is the place, and a report that says which two versions produced it is worth a great deal.