Re: Tool for document management
Hi,
On Sun, Sep 23, 2007 at 04:29:46PM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 08:26:59AM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
> > Hello,
> > I am looking for a tool to help me maintain a backup of a writing project.
> > Being a programmer my first instinct is to use something along the lines of
> > rcs/cvs. I was thinking of svn since I have a project on Google Code and have
> > the tools installed on one of the machines on which I would do a part of the
> > writing. However in attempting to answer this question for myself with Google
> > searches I ran across a message in a mailing list which said that version
> > controls designed for software might not be the best for documents.
> >
> > What I want is the following:
>
> steve, several have pointed out how svn would work for you, but Ron
> made the point that it might not work so well with .odt as they are
> zipped files (I think).
Yep, call it zip or jar file.
> The problem being that you won't get proper
> diffs between versions where you've only changes a few words. I don't
> really know the inner workings of the various VCS, but have a couple
> suggestions.
In theory, OO documents are zipped archive of XML and graphics files.
You can make diff between XML but I do not think you can use diff
efficiently. If you have graphic files etc, diff on them may not be
much useful.
> 1) depending on your requirements in terms of formatting and so forth,
> you could save in a different file format. I think(!) without
> looking that the earlier versions of openoffice saves were not
> compressed, so you may be able to "save as" and earlier version and
> essentially work around that. Or you could use .rtf or .txt or
> whatever, again depending on whether you need support for
> formatting and so forth during the writing stage.
Yes but that loses info and extra work. (You can always get text out
from old odt files quite easily if you need it later for some reason.)
> 2) ISTM that it would be darn straightforward to get a VCS to handle
> zip files properly -- unzipping the current repo version and
> comparing to the new incoming version and then zipping the whole thing
> up. I know it doesn't help your current situation much, but once of
> the "still in development" VCS'es might be able to incorporate this
> feature right away. I'm thinking particular of Darcs which is still
> heavily worked on, I think, and being written in Haskell should be
> subject to fairly quickly adding a feature like this. Might be
> worth a shot.
But why let the generic VCS do something which it is not designed for.
Just let them store old files as they are designed for.
I suggest a bit more practical solution using readily available
functions.
Whatever editor you use (OO Write or even MS Word), they provide change
history function. You save files as is into VCS with history enabled.
You retrieve the latest non-broken file and you get history in it.
Osamu
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