Secret newlines in openoffice

[Hendrik Boom <hendrik@topoi.pooq.com>]

I'm trying to store openoffice test files in a format that's friendly to 
revisino control systems -- thus text should be broken up into reasonably 
short lines so that edits are likely to be on different lines and not 
conflict during a merge.  Che compressed zipped directories are, of 
course, no good for this.

the .fodt file format at first looed promising.  It wasn't compressed, so 
it was plausible that textual changes could show up as textual changes.  
Unfortunately, the entire document is not one line of xml text.

Is there any way to force OpenOffice to insert lots of extra otherwise 
redundant newlines into the file at standard locations?  Soch as after 
every XML tag, after every sentence, after every comma, or somehting like 
that?  None of these would affect the semantics (as far as I know), but 
they would make the text a lot easier to difference and merge.

Or is there a revision control system that's immune to the long line 
problem.

-- hendrik