Should I Upload Word Documents to Github
TL;DR: Word Diff empowers you to be a Markdown person in a Microsoft Discussion world by automatically converting Word documents to Markdown each time y'all commit to GitHub, where they can exist diffed, versioned, and collaborated on internally.
Being a lawyer and a developer, it tin be frustrating to see dandy collaboration tools like version control beingness snubbed, in favor of the lowest mutual collaborative denominator: emailing Microsoft Word documents with ambiguously versioned filenames.
At GitHub we employ Git and the pull request menstruum to collaborate on everything, not just software, but working with government agencies and outside counsel, we're oftentimes forced to fall back to "the old manner" of doing things. You lot'd be difficult pressed to find a meliorate way to troll a developer than to bandy out things like distributed version control for in-document tracked changes emailed back and forth.
What did y'all change in the last round of redlines? How practise I know you didn't just turn off track changes and make me promise to sell you lot my soul? How can my coworkers propose a change to the document? What metadata am I inadvertently sending to you in this black box? Why is there all this formatting noise for such as simple change? And virtually importantly, what happens when the file inevitably becomes corrupt?
Geeks solved this problem decades ago. Information technology's called version control. We know that if so much every bit a single character is off, unabridged programs come up crashing to a halt. That's why nosotros have evolved collaboration tools like Git, to runway every change, both proposed or realized, from both internal and external collaborators, but, the business organisation globe hasn't followed quite the same path for various reasons. That'due south where Word Diff comes in.
Permit say you're working on a Word Certificate, and have fabricated three rounds of changes, committing the file to a Git repository after each round. Your change history might look something like this:
Normally, if you were to try to view a single commit to review what's changed, due to Discussion'southward blackness-box nature, the best yous could get would likely be something like this:
That'south because, despite its widespread adoption, a Microsoft Give-and-take documents is, in reality, a proprietary and purpose-built legacy format, and one that that's specially hard to utilise exterior of Microsoft Word. And that'due south the exact problem Discussion Diff aims to solve.
Word Diff empowers yous to exist a Markdown person in a Microsoft Word world.
As you work, Give-and-take Diff sits on a server (in my instance Heroku), waiting for you to push your changes. When yous do, it springs into action, automatically converting the Word certificate to Markdown after each commit:
You lot'll notice that for each change I made to important-file.docx, Give-and-take Unequal made that aforementioned change to important-file.md, crediting me as the writer, and preserving my original commit message, as it transparently committed an updated Markdown file to the repository afterward each change to the Word certificate. That way Git functions you're used to — similar blame and a file'southward commit history — piece of work just as you'd expect.
If you were to click the first commit, you'd see exactly what was changed, without the need to download a large, proprietary file; leave the safety and condolement of your browser; or fire upwardly dull desktop software:
But last February, GitHub introduced rendered prose diffs to amend visualize changes to homo-readable text. If we click on the second commit, you tin can see exactly what content was changed in its rendered form:
Heck, you could even do a split diff if you really wanted to dig into things:
At each iteration, I simply committed the Give-and-take document (either via command line, or via the visual interface of GitHub for Mac/Windows), and Give-and-take Diff silently took care of the residuum. I never touched the Markdown file (or bothered to convert things to Markdown myself).
When would you use this? Lets say y'all're collaborating on a document with someone. Normally, you'd email Give-and-take documents with tracked changes back and forth (or use real-fourth dimension collaborative editing tools that don't really capture process). With Discussion Diff you can use Git'south native cryptographic diff functionality - which ensures the authenticity and integrity of a document - to chop-chop verify what's inverse in a given iteration, or compare different versions of the certificate over time, all with a single click.
More importantly, you lot can collaborate using the simple tools you love like Markdown and Git, all the while, the person yous're collaborating with volition be none the wiser (using something like Pandoc or LibreOffice to catechumen things back to Word, if you must).
It'south still a chip crude around the edges, but if you're interested in giving information technology a effort, you lot tin can follow these instructions to set your own case of Discussion Diff, or can take a peek under the hood by looking at the Word to Markdown Ruddy Gem. This is very much but the start. I'd beloved your feedback (and help making information technology better).
Edit: Looking to redline a document with the GitHub uninitiated? Check out Redliner.
Source: https://ben.balter.com/2015/02/06/word-diff/
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