Compare drafts of your book

Between one draft and the next, a book changes in hundreds of places. The file comes back from the editor, the beta reader or the publisher, and the question is always the same: what did they touch? In Verso, you drop both versions of the manuscript and read what changed chapter by chapter, side by side.

When to compare

• Between the second and third draft, to review what you changed yourself.
• When the file comes back from the editor or copyeditor without tracked changes.
• When the typeset proof arrives as a PDF, to check that it's the text you approved.
• When a beta reader returns the file with changes mixed in with comments.

Chapter by chapter

Verso splits the book into the chapters you already marked: the Heading 1 style in Word and LibreOffice, or the # in Markdown. Without styles, it recognizes PROLOGUE, CHAPTER 1, PART 2 and EPILOGUE written in the text. Each chapter shows how many additions, deletions, edits and moved passages it had, and the word balance. Chapters you didn't touch stay hidden.

Moved a chapter? It shows up as moved, in yellow, not as deleted on one side and rewritten on the other. The same goes for a paragraph that changed position within a chapter.

Without autocorrect noise

Straight quotes that became curly, hyphens that became dashes, three dots that became an ellipsis: none of that shows up as a change. Neither do bold, italics or fonts. What stays on screen is only your text.

It handles the whole book

In our tests, a 63,000-word book in .docx is read and compared in about a tenth of a second. It works with .docx, .odt, PDF, .txt and .md, in any combination, and you choose the font, size and colors you read in. For the PDF proof, see compare PDFs.

The manuscript stays with you

The book is read and compared in your browser and isn't uploaded to any server. For an unpublished manuscript, that's what lets you use the tool without a second thought. With the license, Verso also installs as an app and opens offline.