Version control for DOCX and PDF?

Question

I\'ve been playing around with git and hg lately and then suddenly it occurred to me that this kind of thing will be great for documents.

I\'ve

Answer 1

I used SVN (yes, in 2020 :-)) with TortoiseSVN on Windows. It has a built-in function to compare DOCX files (it opens Microsoft Word in a mode where your screen is divided into four parts: the file after the changes, before the changes, with changes highlighted and a list of changes). Screenshot below (sorry for the Polish version of MS Word). I also checked TortoiseGIT and it also has this functionality. I've read that TortoiseHG has it as well.

Answer 2

http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.io/ includes a plugin called docdiff that integrates Word and Excel diff'ing.

Answer 3

This article outlines the solution for Docx using Pandoc While this post outlines solution for PDF using pdf2html.

Answer 4

Only for docx, I compiled instructions for multiple places here: https://gist.github.com/nachocab/6429893

# download docx2txt by Sandeep Kumar
wget -O docx2txt.pl http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~kinzler/home/binp/docx2txt

# make a wrapper 
echo '#!/bin/bash
docx2txt.pl $1 -' > docx2txt
chmod +x docx2txt

# make sure docx2txt.pl and docx2txt are your current PATH. Here's a guide
http://shapeshed.com/using_custom_shell_scripts_on_osx_or_linux/
mv docx2txt docx2txt.pl ~/bin/

# set .gitattributes (unfortunately I don't this can't be set by default, you have to create it for every project)
echo "*.docx diff=word" > .git/info/attributes

# add the following to ~/.gitconfig
[diff "word"]
    binary = true
    textconv = docx2txt

# add a new alias
[alias]
    wdiff = diff --color-words

# try it
git init

# create my_file.docx, add some content

git add my_file.docx

git commit -m "Initial commit"

# change something in my_file.docx

git wdiff my_file.docx

# awesome!

It works great on OSX

Answer 5

If you happen to use a Mac, I wrote a git merge driver that can use Microsoft Word and tracked changes to merge and show conflicts between any file types Word can read & write.

http://github.com/jasmas/wordMerge

I say 'if you happen to use a Mac' because the driver I wrote uses AppleScript, primarily to accomplish this task.

It'd be nice to add a vbscript version to the project, but at the moment I don't have a Windows environment for testing. Anyone with some basic scripting knowledge should be able to take a look at what I'm doing and duplicate it in vbscript, powershell or whatever on Windows.

Answer 6

You can use Beyond Compare as external diff tool for hg. Add to/change your user mercurial.ini as:

[extdiff]
cmd.vdiff = c:/path/to/BCompare.exe

Then get Beyond Compare file viewer rule for docx.

Now you should be able to compare two versions of docx in Beyond Compare.