The Challenge

Needing to know what has changed

The NFPA is a major standards body in the USA and has a catalogue of around 300 fire and electrical safety codes and standards. In print form they are typically hundreds or even thousands of pages long.

When a standard or code is updated, typically every three to five years, many of their customers – including officials, professionals and training and certification bodies – need to know exactly what has changed. The NFPA publishes detailed documents, ‘Redlines’, which compare the current and previous editions of a specific standard or code. In the past they were prepared manually, taking many hours of painstaking work, so it was only practical to create them for their top fifty publications and only in traditional form, not as interactive HTML products.

Approaches taken, nothing worked

The NFPA had tried to reduce this manual effort with different approaches. Tracking changes during the complex editorial process proved unwieldy, while adding change markers was prone to errors. Programmatic approaches looked promising, but quickly went wrong or became unreliable, for example when sections were renumbered or similar phrases were repeated in different sections. 

As they embarked on a project to streamline digital product creation, they asked their chosen technology partner, Wrycan, to provide a fully integrated solution to automate comparing and differencing. 

Build or buy

With their substantial expertise in publishing technology, Wrycan evaluated existing differencing products against the cost of developing the capability in-house.

They recognised the NFPA wanted flexibility, rather than adapting their working to suit the product; they needed fine control of the differencing for different situations; and there were numerous complex scenarios that it needed to handle.

Senior technical specialists at Wrycan carried out detailed evaluations of the available technologies and concluded the best results and lowest project risk would be achieved by integrating XML Compare from DeltaXML.

The Solution

XML Compare adds needed functionality

Wrycan delivered a project which combined their Content Base product with XML Compare. This allows the NFPA to manage all of their content in a single repository, adding automated comparisons in a product-agnostic form. Comparisons are made on the source content and saved in the same place. This allows NFPA staff to generate different products using the exact same difference data, including printed documents and HTML editions.

For HTML products, the system automatically applies styling to each change, in a way that is familiar to users of the printed publications. It also includes the capability to provide more comprehensive change indicators, including toggling the view of all deletions, additions and other changes.