111–120 of 136 posts
On Windows you can just use TortoiseGIT, it can do diff and even merge by calling Word's internal compare tools. I can attest that diff works fine (differences show up as if you had used track changes within word), but I haven't had occasion to try merging Word documents with TortoiseGIT yet. The same functionality was already available in TortoiseSVN.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
i don't know why you are getting down voted for speaking the truth. I don't know a single person who this article would relate to in today's climate since everyone i know is using the latest version of office or on google docs.
The Word compare feature is often a pain to use. This is a decent alternative.
The latest Office products have proper real-time collaboration and change tracking, a la Google Docs.
My SaaS deals primarily with legal documents that for years had been maintained with Word. The pain of emailing documents is real, but the comfort level with how Word works is also real. Over the years, most organizations have developed internal workflows to share and send documents around that bypass the pains, and while they may not be perfect, they work. The funny thing is that the document authors like these ways…
I really don't understand how Word remains so popular. It was created at a time when few people had internet access, and was designed to produce printed documents. It was the perfect tool to write newsletters, flyers, articles, academic papers and manuscripts. The world has moved on though, and I fail to see Word's relevance today, other than the sheer number of people that are familiar with it. Word is expensive, pr…
Basically, it's a "good enough" WYSIWYG, and a number of industries have standardized on it, in spite of the fact they should actually use an open standard + tool that actually fits their needs. I think screenwriting might be the one industry to escape Word, since they use Final Draft as I understand it.
I've mentioned this in a similar thread a few months back, but it looks like it could be relevant here, too: https://github.com/TomasHubelbauer/modern-office-git-diff I've made this script which automatically extracts the Office file format (which is a ZIP archive of XML documents) and versions the XML documents and their extracted text contents alongside the binary Office file. This is done using a Git hook and it s…
This looks very interesting. Do you think it can be applied to other kinds of XML files? I'm interested in using git with a vfx software (The Foundry Nuke) that writes XML projects, and it would be great to have some versioning system for it. I've tried using the git diff patience algorithm, but didn't work well - frequently, the diff was about to remove every single line and add all them back to the XML file.
I got some decent results with `xmllint --format` which is the linter/formatter from libxml2 (so available in most Linux distros and ported to most platforms).
(I was using xmllint as a formatting step when unpacking ODT files in my similar tool to the directly above; mentioned in a sibling comment. I found the XML files in ODT files were much more prone to being minimalized and reformatted/reordered on every save in comparison to DOCX which was surprisingly more stable in XML formatting.)
yes! i have a collection of tweets where fiction/non-fiction writers joke about naming their versions different things. i'm like, use git? i wrote a novella using a folder system + text editor + git. i'm trying to put that into a web app. don't know how useful it would be for other people though. and don't know if it will ever be finished because i need to write.
I wrote a CLI tool in Python for this exact use case and am currently using it to write a novel. Basically the CLI tool solves a lot of the tedious issues that come up (e.g., combining all of the text files, reordering them, etc.) If you like writing out of a text editor (I use Atom) it's super useful. https://github.com/edelgm6/draft
My SaaS deals primarily with legal documents that for years had been maintained with Word. The pain of emailing documents is real, but the comfort level with how Word works is also real. Over the years, most organizations have developed internal workflows to share and send documents around that bypass the pains, and while they may not be perfect, they work. The funny thing is that the document authors like these ways…
It is _their clients_ who don't, not just tech people. I hired lawyers a few times. IMO their redline and email workflow is error-prone craziness that could use improvement. That said, I'm a "tech" person, so I might be biased.
I really don't understand how Word remains so popular. It was created at a time when few people had internet access, and was designed to produce printed documents. It was the perfect tool to write newsletters, flyers, articles, academic papers and manuscripts. The world has moved on though, and I fail to see Word's relevance today, other than the sheer number of people that are familiar with it. Word is expensive, pr…
Non-technical folks do not want to reach for CSS to apply formatting to a text document. Heck, neither do I.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having a lot of experience in both legal (academic and lawyer) and tech (developer and founder), I totally agree with you and think you framed very well the situation. As a lawyer I can full confirm that our industry works as you have described (as regards documents workflows), and with my tech background I can also confirm that most features of dev-oriented solutions like git are mostly uninteresting from a lawyer's…
Similarly, I am a qualified lawyer. I previously worked in a big law firm in London, which describes itself internally as both the “best” and “the most advanced” law firm in the world. I now work full-time as an engineer in software, and increasingly in hardware. I agree with both comments. To add, in large-scale corporate/commercial practice (which is the area which I practised), Git would be useful in replacing ema…
Git was originally designed on an email based workflow for software development (hence the commands am, format-patch and send-email).
For contract negotiation, if the template contract was in plain text, then it could be emailed as a patch. The party would then apply that contract to their local git repository, make the changes and email the diff from the original template back to the first party.
So essentially, you could still use email, but have the diff between changes as the content in those emails (along with inline comments).
Unfortunately, corporate Outlook/O365 based email systems don't work very well when used in that fashion.
My SaaS deals primarily with legal documents that for years had been maintained with Word. The pain of emailing documents is real, but the comfort level with how Word works is also real. Over the years, most organizations have developed internal workflows to share and send documents around that bypass the pains, and while they may not be perfect, they work. The funny thing is that the document authors like these ways…
Having a lot of experience in both legal (academic and lawyer) and tech (developer and founder), I totally agree with you and think you framed very well the situation. As a lawyer I can full confirm that our industry works as you have described (as regards documents workflows), and with my tech background I can also confirm that most features of dev-oriented solutions like git are mostly uninteresting from a lawyer's…
I never trust the received file's "track changes", always compare to the latest version I've sent -- and it is extremely common to find a change that wasn't mentioned/discussed, and somehow magically "accepted" or otherwise not tracked in the other side's "track changes". Whenever I point these out, I always got a "oh, yes, forgot about that one", or "I didn't intend to put that in" or "I'm not sure why it didn't appear in the track-changes view" -- but out of tens of these (with multiple lawyers over multiple years), not one was ever in my favor.
Branching might not be as interesting on a single project - but diffing is, very much; and I'm sure it's not more coveted mostly because most lawyers either (a) don't realize how good it makes life for you when you can diff and blame easily, or (b) are abusing the fact that it is so hard to diff/blame on documents, and certainly (c) usually charge by the hour, so some efficiencies are actually going to cost them money if they implement them (a famous Upton Sinclair quote comes to mind).