I’m wondering if it would be possible for the Snapshot ‘Compare’ to also track formatting? The Snapshot tool is such a good way of preserving edits, and the Compare tool matches Track Changes in other writing programs. But when Compare is selected, it doesn’t include italics, bold, etc., even if the change between the current text and the snapshot is that sentences are now italicized.
I know the formatting is preserved in the Snapshot (when Compare isn’t selected), but I like the Compare tool for its ability to clearly showcase all the edits and differences between text versions. But without showing formatting changes, it’s an incomplete representation of those edits.
The reason for this limitation is that the commonly available tools, that can be embedded in software, are those that provide plain-text comparisons only. There are definitely programs out there that specialise in rich text comparison (of some form), but we’re talking more about programs that only do that one thing, where that’s what they spend all their programming time on (and some accomplish that through plug-ins that other programmers spend their time on).
The secondary complication is even if there were a good toolkit that can be freely embedded into Scrivener for this, it’s not just formatting in an abstract sense that needs to be compared, but the underlying code itself that creates that formatting. I.e. the tool would need to be aware of how the RTF file format works itself, to know what a difference in formatting means. It would be more likely to find something that could find differences in Markdown, HTML, DOCX, or even ODT, than that.
Long story short, dropping the text to plain-text and comparing the content is free, and uses tools that have been around for decades. Anything more complicated than that would probably require a lot of research, potentially licensing, and maybe even extensive development. For something that would be of minor benefit over copying and pasting two versions out into a dedicated tool that does this, it’s never been something high on the list of priorities.