Aren't these hacks the act of adapting our tools to us (at least in an experimental sense)?
Actually, I'm not clear on the context of your complaint. If it's about Word and LibreOffice not playing well with text-based diff typically used by version control systems, then maybe the problem is with the file formats used by Word and LibreOffice.
I don't write many large documents, but I'll use MS Office at work for such things. They don't seem to care about version control for presentations and documentation.
For personal notes, I use Obsidian and Fossil SCM. For blog posts (which I'd like to get back to doing) I used Markdown, Hugo, and GitHub.
> If it's about Word and LibreOffice not playing well with text-based diff typically used by version control systems, then maybe the problem is with the file formats used by Word and LibreOffice.
Text-based diff requires you to make a number of assumptions:
1. I'm writing a plain text file
2. The text file is broken up into multiple lines, each with distinct statements/expressions
Compare that to composing a multi-media file:
1. I'm writing a document with plain text, graphics, possibly video, possibly sound, together on one page
2. The text may not be distinct statements/expressions on different lines
3. The media may change incrementally or wholly
4. The layout on the page may change incrementally or wholly
Some multimedia document formats have a text form (ODF is zipped XML), but it still has different assumptions from the text-based diff. An intelligent program understands when the formatting has only changed slightly, without having line-by-line assumptions. Word & LibreOffice already have such version control/diffing built in. So the technology already exists, but we're not applying it in a way that makes it convenient to store these documents with our other versioned/diffed documents.
What we need is a way to combine different methods of diffing/versioning different kinds of files within one contextual view. The one view would allow you to view code diffs/Word diffs/image diffs/etc from one interface, and push/pull/share them to some kind of remote repository. Like Artifactory, but less terrible.
Actually, I'm not clear on the context of your complaint. If it's about Word and LibreOffice not playing well with text-based diff typically used by version control systems, then maybe the problem is with the file formats used by Word and LibreOffice.
I don't write many large documents, but I'll use MS Office at work for such things. They don't seem to care about version control for presentations and documentation.
For personal notes, I use Obsidian and Fossil SCM. For blog posts (which I'd like to get back to doing) I used Markdown, Hugo, and GitHub.