[lug] highlighting word-by-word differences?

[Neal McBurnett]

I'm forced to try to compare two big Microsoft word documents.
Many of the differences are things like the name of the organization
changing, and that being used in many many paragraphs.

One approach is to convert them to text or html and run diff,
but if the wrapping of a paragraph changes because the names are
different lengths, that would make lots and lots of lines differ.

Are there any good open source tools out there, like diff, but which
focus on changes at the word-by-word level and just highlight the
words that are different?

I know the xemacs ediff program and functions like
ediff-windows-wordwise do this nicely for interactive editing.  But
I'd also like to be able to print out and share the differences, with
highlighting, and I don't know if I can, e.g., generate html output
showing the highlighted differences for the whole file.

Of course other approaches to the basic problem are welcome.
E.g. perhaps openoffice has some tool I haven't run across.

Thanks,

Neal McBurnett                 http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
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