The Challenge

Crucial, complex documents

Scribestar is a collaborative platform for drafting and publishing complex legal documents. It has been designed specifically for professionals working in the demanding and highly regulated business of publishing prospectuses for IPOs and other fund raising in complex capital markets.

The financial and legal consequences of providing incorrect information can be catastrophic, so rigorous review processes are essential. However, the documents are long and complex and typically require several rounds of editing and reviewing by company directors, lawyers, accountants and corporate finance advisors.

Adding additional value to their products

The team at Scribestar recognised that a major value-add for their product would come from helping users reduce the time spent in costly review cycles. They designed numerous features to avoid unnecessary reading and duplication of effort. In particular, they needed to track where changes had occurred between different edits and highlighting which changes would have a statutory implication.

Their developers investigated approaches around identifying and tracking changes in structured documents and found numerous products that could highlight differences between texts. However, they found that all these products were limited to showing the differences; they could not record them meaningfully or mark them up in a way that would allow the Scribestar software to process them and analyse the implications for compliance

The Solution

Working with DeltaXML

The chief software architect at Scribestar had identified DeltaXML as being fundamentally different from line-by-line comparison tools. He recognised the flexibility in the approach that DeltaXML has to marking up changes and he saw the power of being able to track text that is moved within a document.

Because Scribestar has been built around the DITA document standard, they integrated the DITA Compare product from DeltaXML.

The Scribestar developers understood the concepts well, so needed support and training from DeltaXML to be very specific: sharing best practice and specifics about integrating the product. From the outset they commented that the DeltaXML team were very knowledgeable and helpful, and worked with them to add new capabilities into the development roadmap.