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Comment by notaddicted | Hacker News Reader

It is pretty complex, people are used to doing it manually: 1st draft, 2nd draft, 3rd draft, etc.

It might be a good product idea, an ms word clone that brings the benefits of version control.

Also, most common rich text formats don't play well with the diff format, so it can be difficult to see changes in a meaningful way. I actually hope to work on a solution to this problem as a school project this fall, so if anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Other than that, most version control interfaces leave something to be desired. They are natural for us, but not for most other people. I realize that there are some good tools available, but I haven't seen enough of them to say whether or not average users could get used to them.

The new MS Office format is XML with plain text. RTF is also plain text.

However it wouldn't be very hard to do, if you implement a small script that takes the git history and pushes it through a viewer showing different versions of the file. Obviously highlighting would be harder but the changes would be visible. Highlighting requires a bit more babysitting with the file format to produce valid files obviously.

That's the issue I was referring to. The diff tool works on lines, but changes to formatted text documents are word- and tag-based.

I'd say that viewing the changes are more-so the problem because diff will be able to handle the backend of things on most files, changed words in lines are picked up easily, so are tags.

For my "thesis" like paper I had to write for university to finish my degree I learned LaTeX just to be able to keep my document under version control.

I didn't actually use very much of the vcs, but the added security gave me enough peace of mind to just not worry about everything.

Plus, not having to hit apple+s and upload/mail/transfer it manually to another computer everytime, to "backup", saves a lot of time as well.

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