WHERE CHANGE MATTERS
Resources
From ISO Quality Services Ltd.
“The editor has studied law and precisely understands the content. No one else does. DeltaXignia Compare ensures they can focus on legal interpretation rather than spending hours checking structural changes.”
Dr Wolfgang Schindler
Richard Boorberg Verlag
About Richard Boorberg Verlag
Richard Boorberg Verlag, founded in 1927, is a leading German publishing house based in Stuttgart, Germany. Operating as a GmbH & Co. KG, the company employs around 200 staff and generates annual revenues of approximately €16.4 million. The company produces a vast range of juridical publications, including laws, regulations, commentaries, procedural guides, along with resources for legal education and training. Publishing in both print and digital formats, Boorberg offers form collections, commentaries, manuals, guides, journals, and online services tailored to legal professionals and public service sectors.
Headquarters
Stuttgart, Germany
Company Size
Medium
Industry
Legal Publishing
Website
www.boorberg.de
Summary
Richard Boorberg Verlag leveraged DeltaXignia’s high-performance comparison solution to handle large volumes of structural and typographic changes across evolving legal documents. Its highly configurable output enabled automated change detection, accurate filtering, and validation at scale. As a result, Richard Boorberg Verlag achieved:
- Significantly less time and effort required for version control and change validation
- Minimised risk of human error in legal documentation
- Improved user confidence, with editors focused on content, not manual change tracking
- Scalable solution for efficient management of complex documents with 10,000+ changes
DeltaXignia handles large, complex legal documents for many organisations, like Boorberg, processing content at scale with the potential to cut review effort by up to 5 working days or 41 man-hours per publication compared to manual change processing.
The Challenge
Legal publishing requires constant updates to regulatory documents, making version control and accuracy verification a challenging task. Unlike structured dictionary data, legal texts contain complex references, citations, and cross-references, making them difficult to regulate with strict grammar.
At Richard Boorberg Verlag, the editorial team manages a vast and ever-evolving collection of legal publications. The legal material is highly diverse in structure, often including constitutional articles, government regulations, and special administrative rules, enriched with explanatory notes and introductory texts. Dr Wolfgang Schindler, a computational linguist with over 34 years of experience in XML technology, plays a crucial role in ensuring structural quality in legal publication at Richard Boorberg Verlag. With a background in dictionary publishing and extensive experience in XML-based production systems, Dr Schindler specialises in improving data accuracy and developing tools using XSLT, XQuery, and Perl scripts.
Tracking changes between different versions of legal texts
In legal publishing, companies may handle 700–1,000 document revisions annually, a complicated process that requires rigorous accuracy and meticulous attention to detail. Often, it’s not just a matter of spotting a few edits, but going through 10,000+ structural and content changes. For Dr Schindler, whose role is focused on quality assessment, the challenge lies in evaluating data across multiple document versions to ensure structural consistency. This involves checking whether core principles are upheld, not in terms of writing style or wording, but on a structural level and in microtypography.
For example, abbreviations must be used consistently, the use of entities must follow expected patterns, and XML must remain valid and coherent as documents evolve from version one to version two to version three, and so on. The complexity increases further when managing multiple document versions simultaneously and trying to pinpoint exactly what has changed across them all. When faced with a large document that has thousands of changes, manually reviewing these changes becomes an overwhelming task.
Visually checking line-by-line for inconsistencies is not only tedious, but it also increases the risk of human error, especially when the number of changes exceeds what any individual could realistically absorb. For example, a large document with 10,000+ changes could take as long as 5 working days or 41 man-hours to review manually.
“Suppose you’ve got a file of 60 megabytes and 10,312 differences—how do you grasp that? You can’t just scroll down endlessly looking for changes.”
Dr Wolfgang Schindler
Richard Boorberg Verlag
Maintaining consistency across complex legal document structures
A further challenge arises from the structural complexity of the documents. The Quality Assurance department at Richard Boorberg Verlag needs to ensure that things like abbreviations, the use of entities, and character encoding remain uniform across updates. Even subtle inconsistencies, such as the difference between a standard space and a typographic hair space in numeric formatting can compromise document integrity. For example, when a hair space is replaced by a space in a number like “1 000,” this seemingly minor change must be flagged and reviewed systematically.
In fact, judicial bodies such as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit have emphasised that even subtle typographic choices can affect readability and, by extension, interpretation, reinforcing the need for meticulous, granular change detection in legal content.
In addition, Richard Boorberg Verlag’s use of ISO-8859-1 encoding, rather than the more common UTF-8, introduced further complications in processing XML files. These differences in encoding and special character usage meant that traditional comparison tools were often unable to distinguish subtle but meaningful structural edits. In many cases, this made it difficult to detect or quantify changes such as the replacement of regular spaces with specific entities like the hair space, creating a barrier to consistent quality control across legal publications.
Validating automated changes
To manage the scale and complexity of content in legal publishing, Dr Schindler relies on XPath/XSLT and regular expressions to detect and modify recurring patterns across documents. These patterns might reflect formatting issues, outdated conventions, or structural inconsistencies that need to be corrected in bulk. However, while automation speeds up the process, it also introduces risk: Was the intended data changed accurately? Did the transformation go too far, or not far enough?
“When you’ve got a compare tool, it makes a lot of sense to say, ‘Okay, this is the original and this is my change. Did I change what I intended to change, or did I capture too much or too little?’”
Dr Schindler highlights the importance of validating these changes before they reach publication. A wrongly applied edit could lead to loss of content, which is unacceptable when dealing with legally binding materials.
“Did I cover things I didn’t intend to change? Or when taking out certain parts of the data, has it got too much, or is it not sufficient?”
Without an intelligent way to validate what was changed, teams would be left scrolling through enormous documents, line by line, trying to manually spot differences. Traditional file comparison tools that visually highlight differences in side-by-side panes do not scale to meet this need. They require manual inspection of each marked change, far too slow for the scope of work required in legal publishing.
The Solution
Recognising the need for a precise comparison solution, Dr Schindler utilised DeltaXignia Compare, leveraging its powerful XML-based output and configurability to manage and streamline document comparison processes. With legal documents constantly evolving and structured data varying across versions, Richard Boorberg Verlag needed a solution that would not only identify changes accurately but also support deep structural insight and flexibility for further automation.
Achieving Faster Change Detection at Scale
In legal publishing, time is a critical factor. DeltaXignia Compare eliminates the need for endless scrolling by detecting and showing differences in a structured and processable way. This enables Dr Schindler to process changes far more efficiently and determine what must be corrected manually, what can be handled with automation (such as XSLT), and where further refinement is needed.
“Quite simply, DeltaXignia Compare saves me time. If you just get a visual result, then you need many, many hours to consume that and understand what’s really going on. With this solution, I can move quickly from detecting issues to deciding how best to resolve them.”
Dr Wolfgang Schindler
Richard Boorberg Verlag
Solution Tailored for Optimal Performance
One of the standout features for Dr Schindler is DeltaXignia Compare’s ability to adapt to highly specific XML configurations. Richard Boorberg Verlag uses the character encoding ISO-8859-1 rather than UTF-8, which initially caused difficulties. However, with support from the DeltaXignia team, a configuration was created to treat character entities (like hair spaces or special symbols) as distinct, structural components in the delta output.
“For example, if a regular space is replaced with a hair space, the configuration allows me to treat them as XML-compatible elements. In version A there’s a space, in version B there’s a hair space—and I can query all occurrences of that specific change.”
Richard Boorberg Verlag Sample Data: The DeltaOutput detecting granular changes
This level of granularity is essential when precision matters, such as in legal texts where even a small typographic change could alter the meaning or violate formatting standards. Dr Schindler notes that he is not aware of any other solution that can process these nuanced differences so effectively. This not only helps verify whether automated edits had the desired impact, it also helps determine which issues still need to be fixed manually or handled through further processing, such as XSLT.
Sample Data: The DeltaOutput explained
Customisable Output for Precise Document Control
Unlike many tools that only offer side-by-side visual comparisons, DeltaXignia Compare generates a rich XML-based delta file, which gives Dr Schindler complete control over how he analyses and processes the results. Instead of scrolling through thousands of highlighted changes on-screen, he can filter the output using XPath, narrowing the results to only the differences that matter most.
“You get an XML file with attributes, and you may filter that using XPath. You can say, ‘Show me only the differences where A is not equal to B in a specific attribute or group.’ It’s powerful because it helps you focus.”
This structured output means Dr Schindler can determine whether certain patterns of change appear consistently, which is critical for catching issues that might otherwise go unnoticed. As the output file is standard XML, it’s easy to process and integrate with existing workflows. Developers can use XSLT or XQuery to automate next steps, such as transforming, validating, or correcting content based on the results. DeltaXignia Compare gives document management teams the ability to define exactly what they want to find and how they want to act on it, making the comparison process not only more accurate, but also far more efficient.
“And so DeltaXignia Compare is perfectly optimised for XSLT/XQuery programming and for the mindset of an XML developer…they really understand XML and many who say they do, really don’t.”
Dr Wolfgang Schindler
Richard Boorberg Verlag
The Result
The implementation of DeltaXignia Compare delivered significant benefits to Richard Boorberg Verlag, including:
- Time Saving: DeltaXignia Compare drastically reduced the time required for version control and change validation
- Improved Accuracy: By automating structural and microtypographic review, the software minimised the risk of human error in legal documentation.
- Scalability: The ability to filter and script against XML output allowed Richard Boorberg Verlag to efficiently manage large, complex documents.
- Enhanced User Confidence: Legal editors could focus on content interpretation rather than manual change tracking.
- Support and Collaboration: Expert support team always on hand to assist and ensure ongoing success with the solution.
“The support is always very positive, very kind, and efficient.”
Dr Wolfgang Schindler
Richard Boorberg Verlag
Let’s Deal with Change
DeltaXignia’s products are used throughout the world, from SMEs to global enterprises. Our comparison and merging software transform the way our customers handle change in their documentation and data. If the above story resonated with your own challenges get in touch with us by either booking a discovery call or filling in our contact form.
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