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Comment by x0x0 | Hacker News Reader

The other huge advantage that you almost touched on is tex files are text, so you can source control them. This is particularly important if different people are working on different chunks of a document. You can kind of hack around this in word, but it's a giant pita.

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Even better, you can script parts. Yes, the text nature was what I was highlighting. I didn't want to overstate it.

In particular, for short papers within a term, the sharing feature of word is decent enough. I confess I prefer text source control, but I know most of my peers in school did not.

Word has its own version control built in, which works pretty well. You can see all revisions, and step through and accept/reject. You can also do diff of two documents.

This is definitely good for papers that are "one and done." Just don't upgrade during. And try to have a set of coworkers are using the same version and is.

For 2 people, maybe; but even then you're doing the equivalent of emailing your entire repo (in a doc) back and forth. Which is how you end up with

   report.latest.2017_0713.new.with_additions.current.adamssversion.ready.lastchange.docx

being emailed...

And if you have 3 people collaborating, sooner or later someone makes edits to something besides HEAD and then there's a giant mess to sort out.

There are git review tools that are able to diff docx.

How do those work with the rest of the git machinery? Does git add -p work? How are merge conflicts handled? What about git blame?

It seems to me that that everything about git is based on text files that are changed by adding and removing lines, but if there is a way to replace that behavior to handle non-textual file formats, I'd be very interesting in learning about it.

Unfortunately, this particular review tool was an internal utility at my previous employer. The only thing it could do was highlight changes in word documents. You could compare patch sets. That's all. And it was a review tool. Git itself still treated docx files more or less like binaries. The advantage was we could use word documents instead of markdown files, usually people would embed visio diagrams inside design docs etc.

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