Can I merge two Microsoft Word documents reliably with Subversion?

Question

We have concurrent edits happening on Word documents and I want to make sure that Subversion can handle merging .doc files. Do you know if Subversion handles merges of Word documents well?

Answer 1

Word documents are binary, so, no. Are the editors knowledgeable enough that they can be taught how to use a plain-text format like reStructuredText or LaTeX?

Answer 2

No: since Word uses a binary file format, svn cannot merge the files at all.

However, Word itself has a merge feature. You might try that if you have to resolve a merge conflict.

Answer 3

Use TortoiseSVN merge utility with the xdocdiff plugin to compare and merge Office documents

Answer 4

I would add the svn:needs-lock property to Word documents stored in Subversion so that people are required to lock the file before editing it. This will go a long way to prevent merge conflicts.

This is what we do at work and it works great. (We don't have a choice about having to use Word documents, thus this solution rather than changing the file type.)

Answer 5

You can use TortoiseSVN in its default installation to view diffs and perform merges of Word documents, it just opens up Word and uses Word's own review/changes mode to do it.

Edit: By default it also has diffing capabilities for PowerPoint, Excel, OpenOffice and StarOffice formats. (Check the TortoiseSVN\Diff-Scripts directory).

Answer 6

You might also consider using a non binary format like Html

Answer 7

You can save docx documents to a "Flat OPC" XML format using Word (Save As .. XML document).

This way you get a plain text file.

What you'll need to watch out for though, is that the relationship id's don't get corrupted.

For example:

• user A adds an image (or a hyperlink, or a comment, or a footnote etc) to the document, and does an svn commit.

• user B (without svn updating) adds one of those things in Word, saves as xml, then does svn update.

User B is unlikely to be able to open the document in Word at this point, so he better not commit it. If you can control for this, or are prepared to manually fix the problems, you'll be ok.

Otherwise, you could consider something like my Plutext collaboration software, which shreds the document and versions its constituent bits, in Alfresco.

Answer 8

I'm currently working on a Word plugin that uses SharpSVN to connect to a repository. At current state it is kind of complicated to create and to select new documents but that shouldnt be a big issue.

So when you (finally) have a document in the repository it is quite simple to commit and to update from any revision. You can compare and merge those .docx files with Word's built in compare or merge features. Quite simple actually. Hope to get it done the next weeks or so.

Answer 9

squirril, Any progress/update on your plugin? It sounds interesting.

Answer 10

These are not proper answers.

I have a Huge file like 100 MBs word files containing Images and Huge texts.Please advice what to do and How to make things allign.