[rhn_mk1]

Not long ago I read some article here on HN that the world is still waiting for a git equivalent for documents. This seems like a good start.

Now we need a native diff viewer for structured files, where the changes are presented with attribution either side by side, or alongside (like gitk, or like gitlab diff viewer).

Then we need an editor that supports doing the gitty stuff natively, so that the non-technical writer doesn't have to worry about creating repos and committing the changes from the command line.

[lewisjoe]

Tip: Zoho Writer - https://writer.zoho.com is a Google Docs alternative and comes with additional tools to compare docx files.

https://www.zoho.com/writer/help/document-tools.html#Combine...

[ben-morris]

After a lot of trying to get Git and Word to play nice together, we ended up building a collaboration tool to bring the power of Git (branching & merging) to non-technical Word users.

Feedback welcome: https://www.simuldocs.com/

[dvfjsdhgfv]

Congrtulations, it seems really easy to use. Just one thing: I noticed formatting changes (such as italics) are ignored. Is this deliberate?

[ben-morris]

Thanks! It is, it's quite hard to highlight exactly what changed regarding formatting and we found our users mostly cared about content changes.

Having said that, adding an option to include formatting changes is on our roadmap.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

Yes, it very much depends on the type of content you're editing. My take is that if you don't care about tracking formatting changes, you don't really need Microsoft Word - many other tools could do better.

However, when you're a professional copy editor of non-fiction publications, a substantial part of your work will consist of checking little details, such as making sure the titles of books, magazines, and articles are formatted correctly and so on.

[zwp]

Can an attacker use a formatting change to alter the sense of a document? Eg. make the text color the same as the background color or invisibly small?

[ben-morris]

Potentially this could be used to remove some content (or make it appear removed) without it being highlighted. I doubt this is an issue in practice, considering there's a full audit trail and collaborators are usually trusted, but this is good feedback and we'll see if we can improve this.