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Using Microsoft Word with Git

blog.martinfenner.org

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Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#51

Post by michihuber »

tom1239 wrote: post #50
ghego1 wrote: post #17

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…

Tom, would also love to ask you a few questions via email.

m@replace-with-my-username.com

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#52

Post by lewisjoe »

codingdave wrote: post #14

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…

In 2013, we were hacking away a document tracking system to solve exactly this. We thought we were disrupting the legal market while in reality the lawyers were way too comfortable with Word and emailing docx files.

Exactly like you've hinted, the right way to crack this is to bring a full-fledged word processor like Google Docs, but instead of ad-hoc realtime collaborations the software has to enable customizable unidirectional document workflows with controlled collaboration.

Most serious document creators don't want to branch and merge, instead they want to pass on the document through a series of stages. They want statistics on when, what and why of each stage. And at any point of time the document is in one definitive stage not scattered across emails/folders/versions/forks.

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#53

Post by tmaly »

I implemented something just like this but in CVS for legal documents back in 2007.

I am finally replacing it with a sharepoint solution. Its a headache to have to maintain versions for non-technical people.

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#54

Post by tom1239 »

michihuber wrote: post #51
tom1239 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tom, would also love to ask you a few questions via email. m@replace-with-my-username.com

Sure thing. Emailed.

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#55

Post by gumby »

atoav wrote: post #35
codingdave wrote: post #14

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…

As someone who is at the intersection of tech and arts one of the things I like about using git in projects is that it is very clear what is the latest official defintive final variant of a piece of data and you don't have to ask anybody to get it. When I worked as a VFX freelancer I was amazed at the number of hours (=money) burned by marketing agencies who didn't manage to give me the definitive variant for a simpl…

> As someone who is at the intersection of tech and arts one of the things I like about using git in projects is that it is very clear what is the latest official defintive final variant of a piece of data and you don't have to ask anybody to get it.

As git is a distributed system I think it’s not at all clear what the definitive final variant might be —- and that is a strength.

That can be handled externally to git via ad hoc convention, say by using a system like gitlab or github and letting it declare one as “primary”, or by having someone post to a mailing list (“Commit X on a repo you can reach at URI Y is the official release”) both of which are common.

But in your example various people could mail you commits and not have any consensus on which is authoritative.

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#56

Post by crazygringo »

lewisjoe wrote: post #52
codingdave wrote: post #14

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…

In 2013, we were hacking away a document tracking system to solve exactly this. We thought we were disrupting the legal market while in reality the lawyers were way too comfortable with Word and emailing docx files. Exactly like you've hinted, the right way to crack this is to bring a full-fledged word processor like Google Docs, but instead of ad-hoc realtime collaborations the software has to enable customizable un…

Yup. Even Google Docs supports this types of approvals workflow (in beta):

https://support.google.com/a/answer/9381067?hl=en

Unlike its normal collaboration mode, the file gets locked down.

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#57

Post by rleigh »

est31 wrote: post #19
bugmen0t wrote: post #16

FWIW, if you're using libreoffice write you can save your file as a flat odt file (.fodt), which gives you a version-controllable format

Interesting, I didn't know about fodt! Only knew that godot engine had done something similar (for git specifically). I downloaded a docx document from the net, opened it in libre office, removed a single word, saved it as fodt, removed a single word again, saved it as fodt again, and the diff between the two fodt is gigantic. Apparently there are lots of items like whose content didnt change, but their ID did. It di…

Yes, it definitely has its limitations.

It used to store everything on one line without breaks if I recall correctly.

With a little bit of work to ensure stability of numbering, FODT and related flat ODF formats could be really usable with version control.

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#58

Post by PaulHoule »

You do know that a Word document is really a ZIP file? The text content is inside an XML document that, in principle, Github would work on. All you have to do is unzip the document, store the directory in GitHub and repack it for Word to use.

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#59

Post by PaulHoule »

viraptor wrote: post #30
MarcScott wrote: post #28

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…

> If you're collaborating on a document then markdown or LaTeX has you covered. These are not WYSIWYG solutions which answers 99% of your question "why". When people want to write a document they want to write things and have the things appear on a page, possibly in different formatting. Injecting ideas like source files, rendering pipeline, etc. will just result in confused people. That's why online solutions like G…

TeX is a 1970s system. I thought it was cool in the 1990s, but in 2020 it makes the typesetter in me want to hurl.

Re: Using Microsoft Word with Git

#60

Post by PaulHoule »

xnyan wrote: post #48
MarcScott wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my argument is that WYSIWYG needs to die. For the vast majority of people they want nothing more than: > text > image > more text > table > more text There are any number of applications that allow you to write markdown and view the generated HTML in whatever formatting you want. Your recipient then gets to choose their own fonts, colours etc, which from an accessibility point of view, is much better. Unless…

You're speaking absolute crazy talk man. >Write markdown You have now lost almost all people who currently write documents. Nobody who is not a developer wants to write in markdown. The mass market wants point and click, buttons, and WYSIWYG.

What gets me is that there's something basically wrong with the "Microsoft Word" text editing model.

Basically, when you try to set the properties of text (e.g. bold, fonts, ...) there are always anomalous behaviors involving:

* if you just start typing what font it is in

* selections (why is that the selection region seems to actively avoid the exact selection you want?)

There is something fundamentally wrong with the data model behind it that makes it impossible to implement in a way that makes sense 100%.

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