Version Control for Writers

[Richard Hartmann]

On Thu, Aug 1, 2013 at 4:18 PM, Cory Francis Myers <cfm at panix.com> wrote:

> As much as I prefer this route myself, I venture that not all writers
> have this choice to make.  Journalism outfits and publishing houses
> alike have established workflows that depend on Microsoft Word, its
> impoverished track-changes feature, and so on.  Plain-text diffs aren't
> realistic in these settings.

Exporting to plain text and tracking that alongside the unmergeable
binary format that is doc(x) could be an option for disaster recovery.
Mechanisms to hide merge conflicts in binary formats (always rebase
and thus chain into one looooong history while tagging with dates?)
would need to be hacked into it all.


> At this point
> I'd rather see a general-purpose versioning filesystem than more format-
> specific tools.

They can not merge binary data, either. Same problem.


>  As nondestructive image-editors become more popular I
> suspect we'll see interest in this direction for a lot more than just
> text.

Agreed.


Richard