Using Redline Pad

Redline Pad opens as two empty panes and a third that fills itself. Paste a clause into Original, and paste or type the other version into Revised. The redline appears as you go. For most jobs, that is the whole of the tool.

Getting text in

What arrives depends on where it came from. Word, Outlook and Gmail put formatting on the clipboard; a PDF viewer puts bare text; and applications differ between versions. The tool keeps as much of it as the panes can show, so a clause out of an unusual or an old application may arrive plainer than it looked there.

Nothing is ever dropped. What the panes cannot show loses its formatting and keeps its text, so a clause is never quietly shorter than the one you copied.

Pasting from Word, Outlook or Gmail

Bold, italic, underline, headings, lists and tables come across and are compared, so a defined term that lost its emphasis is marked as a formatting change rather than missed. A table stays a table, with changes marked inside the cell they happened in.

Colours, fonts, indents and spacing set on the text itself are stripped as the paste lands. So is anything the panes have no shape for: a table inside a table is flattened into the cell that held it, a caption becomes a paragraph, and column widths are the tool's own.

Typing it in

Both panes are ordinary editors, so for two versions of one sentence, typing is quicker than finding something to copy. Under the prompt in Original there is a worked example, which fills both panes at once.

Pasting from a PDF

Text copied out of a PDF arrives broken into one paragraph per line, because that is how the PDF laid it out. A Join wrapped lines control then appears beside the pane's name and joins the lines in what you just pasted — not the rest of the pane, and not paragraphs you typed yourself.

It is an offer rather than something that happens on its own. No reliable way of telling a wrapped line from a real paragraph break was found, and guessing wrong either joins two clauses into one or leaves a clause in pieces. You know where your text came from; the tool does not.

Pasting a clause with tracked changes still in it

Copying a clause out of a Word document with revisions still in it puts both wordings on your clipboard at once, so the paste stops and asks which one you meant:

• Paste the revised text — as it reads with the changes accepted.
• Paste the original text — as it read before them.
• Compare the two versions — fills Original and Revised from the one paste.
• Paste it as it stands — both wordings, deletions struck through.

The third is the one worth knowing about: a clause somebody sent you with their changes still in it becomes a redline in a single paste. Nothing is inserted until you answer, and Esc cancels the paste.

The question appears when the clipboard carries Word's own record of the revisions — Word writes it out, the tool does not infer it. A copy from a PDF, or from a document open in a browser, arrives as ordinary text and no question comes up.

Reading the redline

Insertions are underlined and deletions are struck through where they stood, rather than hidden or moved to a margin. The bar above the panes counts what changed: how many insertions, how many deletions, and formatting changes separately when there are any.

One change at a time

The bar above the panes also says Change 3 of 11, and the arrows beside it step through the changes one at a time. A change is what you would count as one — a replaced phrase is a single stop, not a deletion followed by an insertion. Where the panes are side by side, they scroll together, so the change you are on stays level across them.

Room to read

With all three panes on screen, each pane head carries a control that expands that pane to fill the screen, and puts the other two back when you press it again. Your place is kept as the change you were on rather than as a scroll position, so changing the width does not lose it.

On a narrow screen

On a phone — and in any window too narrow or too short to hold three columns — the panes stop being columns and one is on screen at a time. A tablet held upright keeps all three. A row of names above it says which — Original, Revised, Redline — and the Redline name carries the number of changes once there are any. The eraser sits at the end of that row and empties whichever pane you are looking at. The arrows and Copy move to a bar along the bottom, within reach of a thumb and staying put while the pane scrolls behind them.

Deletions in columns

Under Settings, setting Deletions to Side-by-side keeps the two versions in their own columns, each marking only its own half of every change. It is a way of reading a heavily rewritten clause on a wide screen.

It changes how you read, not what you copy: the redline that leaves is the inline one either way.

Colour, and doing without it

Underline and strike-through carry the meaning on their own, so nothing is lost by changing the colours. Single colour puts insertions and deletions in one family. Black and white is for a version going into a signature bundle.

Changes you can see, and changes you cannot

Some real changes leave nothing on screen to look at. A non-breaking space swapped for an ordinary one shows as a struck gap beside an inserted gap. A Cyrillic А standing in for a Latin A is the same shape at every size. A zero-width character inside a word — Word and PDF both leave them behind — changes the word without changing anything visible.

Below is that last one, drawn by the tool. Both versions end with the same five words, and they are not the same text:

Your text is never tidied to make the redline look better. Instead, a note beside the paragraph says in words what the marks cannot show. It is written out rather than shown on hover, so it survives being copied out.

Formatting changes are marked more quietly, with a dotted underline. Below, a defined term has lost its bold; pointing at that underline, or reaching it with the keyboard, says which mark changed. A block that changed kind — a numbered list that became bulleted, a heading that became a paragraph — carries the same explanation on a marker of its own, and so does a quotation or a list taken away from around a clause that stayed: the words did not move, so there is nothing in them to mark, and the marker says what went instead.

What counts as a change

Four settings, under Settings at the right-hand end of the bar above the panes, decide what the comparison treats as a difference. Each carries a short explanation beside it.

• Ignore spacing, on by default. Runs of spaces, tabs and line wraps count as one space. Turn it off when the spacing is what you are checking.
• Match case, on by default, so Company and company are different words. Defined terms depend on it.
• Ignore quote style, off by default, so a curly quote replaced by a straight one still shows as a change. Turn it on after a document has been through something that changed them all at once.
• Show formatting changes, on by default. Bold, italic and underline count as changes in their own right.

None of them rewrites your text. A setting changes how the two versions are matched against each other, never the text itself: the characters shown, copied and exported are always the ones you pasted.

The same panel holds the three colour schemes, and switches off the Change bar in the margin — the vertical line beside a changed paragraph. The change itself is still marked either way.

Settings are not saved. They return to their defaults when the tab closes, because nothing is stored between visits.

Taking it away

Copy, in the Redline pane head, opens a short list rather than copying straight away. Four destinations want four different things.

Redline and Tracked changes read as the same thing and are not. The first is drawn as formatting and looks the same wherever it lands. The second becomes real revisions in Word — and is hidden by Outlook, which shows the recipient the text with every change accepted and no sign that anything was marked. For an email, it is the first one.

How closely the redline matches what you see here is not something this tool can settle. Email clients, chat applications and Word itself each honour a different amount of formatting, and differ between versions. So the redline carries its marks in several forms at once, and something survives wherever it lands. It will not look identical everywhere. It will be legible everywhere.

⌘⇧C on a Mac, or Ctrl+Shift+C on Windows, copies the redline from anywhere on the page, including from inside a pane, where a plain ⌘C copies your selection instead. If a browser refuses the formatted version, the plain-text version goes instead and the control says Copied as text.

Starting again

The eraser in a pane head empties that pane, and can be undone. Clear both, in the bar above the panes, empties both and asks first: nothing is stored, so there would be nothing to bring back.

What it will not do

It does not open files. Text arrives by paste and leaves by clipboard. If what you have is two files, comparing the files is the better job — Word's own Compare does it properly and keeps the document on your machine.

It does not compare documents. It knows only the two pieces of text it was given, so it has nothing to say about numbering, cross-references, a definition that changed three pages earlier, or a schedule that moved. Word Compare, Litera and Draftable are built for that, and the comparison pages say where each earns its place.

It keeps no history. There is no list of what you compared, so there is nothing left behind on a shared machine.

It has no share links. Nothing is stored, so there is no copy of your clause behind an address that could be forwarded, guessed or subpoenaed.

The guides cover the work rather than the tool. To satisfy yourself about the no-upload claim before pasting anything, the checks take about two minutes and work on any tool, not just this one.

Questions or feedback

If something here did not answer your question, or the tool did something this page does not describe, the feedback form is the place. If you would rather not use a form, support@redlinepad.com reaches the same inbox. There is no need to send the clause itself: saying which browser you were in, and where the text came from — Word, an email, a PDF — is usually enough to track it down.

What a comparison can miss, and what to check before relying on one, is on the disclaimer.