For fun, I downloaded an MS Word diff program (http://www.componentsoftware.com/Products/CSDiff/) and used TortoiseSVN to use this for *.doc files. It works great. The app itself occasionally munges indentation changes on lists, but it does the sort of thing folks are asking about here.
TortoiseSVN also has the same abilities to define custom merge tools, and I bet this one would work. I haven't tried it yet, though. Since I'm stuck in a Windows world, I don't know if this is a feature in SVN itself, or special to TortoiseSVN, but if you're on the windows platform, you'd be nuts not to try TortoiseSVN (or TortoiseCVS for that matter.)
Ultimately, merging documents is not something you really want to automate. It's not code that breaks a build and has obvious changes. It really is something humans have to see (edit) but this type of diff/merge tool would certainly help.
-Matt
-----Original Message-----
From: Vincent Starre [mailto:vstarre@comcast.net]
Sent: Friday, August 26, 2005 5:37 AM
To: Carl Baldwin
Cc: Jay Paulson; users@subversion.tigris.org
Subject: Re: Questions about using subversion for non-coding projects.
You may be able to due such a thing by pointing the diff program to a
wrapper which will determine
the type of file and act accordingly. I dont know what kind of output
svn requires, though.
(*this is all a wild guess :) )
Carl Baldwin wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I just had a thought.
>
>I wonder if subversion could be made to defer the merging operation on
>files with certain mime-types. This way, subversion would merely detect
>the need to merge a file but defer the actual work to a script or
>something. In the best case, it might be possible to wrap tools that
>would attempt (hopefully successfully) to merge files like MS office
>documents. If nothing else, the script could tell the user that a merge
>needs to be done and mark the working copy dirty.
>
>I actually got this idea from git. It has this sort of flexibility.
>Actually, it will make a great back-end for this sort of use when it
>gets a webdav interface (plus maybe autoversioning) and a neat windows
>client. For now, though, its not an option.
>
>Carl
>
>On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 07:01:18PM -0400, Vincent Starre wrote:
>
>
>>I would not recommend subversion for "text"-like things which are not
>>bare text. While svn certainly /can/ do things like this, it would treat
>>all files as binary, so a lot (though certainly not all) of the
>>usefulness would be gone.
>>Word[for example] is a common enough format that I'm sure there are some
>>version control systems which are format-aware of Word[for example] files.
>>Though I can't say with certainty, having not actually used it,
>>"SharePoint" comes to mind.
>>
>>Jay Paulson wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Hello all-
>>>
>>>I'm doing some research for many things and from reading about
>>>subversion it might do the trick, but I still have questions.
>>>
>>>The company I currently work for has many different projects, however
>>>they are not coding projects. The projects are mainly research ones
>>>with many documents (Word, Excell, PDF docs etc) that are used with
>>>this research (mainly documents things about the research but usually
>>>go through many versions before a final version is released).
>>>
>>>What is needed is some sort of version control system that team
>>>members can use to share files, collaborate ideas, and basically have
>>>a project tracker kind of like SourceForge.net.
>>>
>>>My question is can Subversion handle something like this with mainly
>>>different kind of documents that aren't programs etc? Is there a good
>>>web interface that promotes users to collaborate? I would prefer if
>>>the web interface was written in PHP but if there are good ones
>>>written in something else I'd like to see them.
>>>
>>>Thanks for any suggestions!
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>
>
>
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Received on Fri Aug 26 18:10:02 2005