[cvsnt] cvsnt for word doc version control

[Tim Chippington Derrick]

Of course I agree with all these points - I am only used to using the 
free version of CVSNT, and have never had any support to help me in 
its setup and use (I'm self-taught, as I guess are most people here). 
I do know that CVSNT can do diffs on binary files too - it's just 
that I never yet found them to be very much use. In the word 
documents that I use, I am really only interested in the text itself 
and what it means, and the format and layout are almost irrelevant 
other than to make it easier for humans to read. But the doc formats 
are such that the text changes often get swamped and hidden by the 
foggy mush of binary formatting stuff, fonts, images etc. that is 
mixed in and around it.

If anyone out there has any pointers to tutorials etc on how to set 
up to do really useful diffs on word docs, using things like 
winmerge, then many here would be very grateful. Same goes for 
spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations, pdfs, visio files, etc. If 
this is really viable and really works well, I would definitely be 
happy to put my hand in my bank account and pay for the tools and 
support to really get it working.

At 10:38 09/02/2007, Luigi D. Sandon wrote:
> > wholly or partly binary, and CVSNT doesn't do version control on these
> > sorts of files very well - it just keeps a fresh copy for each new
> > version. It's not really CVSNT's problem - its the brain-dead MS
>
>That's no longer true. CVSNT can store diffs of binary files too... -kB.
>
> > file formats that effectively cripple virtually any serious attempt to do
> > proper version management.
>
>Again, not true. It's a proprietary format, that's true, and complex enough
>to allow for merging without its own editor. You would not be able to merge
>a complex document even if it was in a open XML standard, without something
>that can understand the format. Source code is far easier to manage.