I document here an "experimental" feature introduced.
Background
When collaborating online on a document, from time to time, you may need to download and compile the document for a quick check without losing suggested edits and tracked changes. Before downloading, however, you have to accept all suggested edits. Taking advantage of the “Undo” option available in Google Docs, it is possible to download the current document version at any time during the workflow without the need to accept all suggested edits permanently :
“Tools > Review suggested edits > Accept all” and, after the download, press “Undo” to restore the document to its previous state
However, this can not be done with the comments. You can not remove and restore the comments in google docs.
Issue
When downloading the document for a quick check you will download all google comments in the document as well. Therefore, before compiling the document, comments have to be removed manually. This is a repetitive, time-consuming, process.
Solution
To overcome this issue, we introduced an optional (experimental) argument to trackdown::download_file(). By specifying rm_gcomments = TRUE (default is FALSE), google comments will be automatically removed from the document.
Technical Info
Google comments are listed at the bottom of the file. Comments are of type "[a]my comment". Alphabetic indexes between square brackets (i.e., [a], [b], ... , [aa], [ab], etc.) are used as tags to identify the comment and indicate comments' position in the text.
The internal function remove_google_comments() removes comments and comments' tags. The process is conservative. If there are any issues in the comments' identification, the specific comment is not removed.
For example, it the tag "[a]" appears multiple times in the document as actual user's text (and not only as a comment tag) tags "[a]" and relative comment are not removed
Reference commit with introduced changes: 28b5224
I document here an "experimental" feature introduced.
Background
When collaborating online on a document, from time to time, you may need to download and compile the document for a quick check without losing suggested edits and tracked changes. Before downloading, however, you have to accept all suggested edits. Taking advantage of the “Undo” option available in Google Docs, it is possible to download the current document version at any time during the workflow without the need to accept all suggested edits permanently :
However, this can not be done with the comments. You can not remove and restore the comments in google docs.
Issue
When downloading the document for a quick check you will download all google comments in the document as well. Therefore, before compiling the document, comments have to be removed manually. This is a repetitive, time-consuming, process.
Solution
To overcome this issue, we introduced an optional (experimental) argument to
trackdown::download_file(). By specifyingrm_gcomments = TRUE(default isFALSE), google comments will be automatically removed from the document.Technical Info
Google comments are listed at the bottom of the file. Comments are of type "[a]my comment". Alphabetic indexes between square brackets (i.e., [a], [b], ... , [aa], [ab], etc.) are used as tags to identify the comment and indicate comments' position in the text.
The internal function
remove_google_comments()removes comments and comments' tags. The process is conservative. If there are any issues in the comments' identification, the specific comment is not removed.For example, it the tag "[a]" appears multiple times in the document as actual user's text (and not only as a comment tag) tags "[a]" and relative comment are not removed
Reference commit with introduced changes: 28b5224