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Comment by markokocic | Hacker News Reader

How is this different from what "git --diff" provides out of the box for .docx documents?

Draftable for Word lives right in the Word ribbon, with native Word rendering of the documents. You get a side-by-side view of the documents with deleted and inserted text highlighted, and synchronised scrolling. By not having to switch programs, it doesn’t break up your workflow.

It also works great with Track Changes, and has a handy “Changes Since Opened” feature, which saves a snapshot every time you start working.

Thanks for the question, and we hope you give it a try!

*Disclaimer: I work on Draftable :)

The overlap of Word users and git users is small enough that it makes sense to create a simple to use tool for what is essentially the same task.

I don't think git can show word documents. Sure, they might be XML under the hood, but getting a diff between blobs of XML isn't quite the same as a side-by-side comparison in a nice UI.

It's even a ZIP file with multiple files inside, only one of which is the actual document. So naïvely you'd just get back a binary diff. But I found some ways of crudely extracting text and feeding that to git for diffing so maybe those are already built-in in Windows versions. But that still just gives you a normal text diff and nowhere near as user-friendly as having something directly in the tool you're working in.

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