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Need Source Control for my book (in English)

I am a developer and love Git. But I am writing a book and rely on Word. But Word files and Git are oil and water, since it can easily mangle the file and render it useless. Right?

How about using an RTF? Is that a format which works with source control?

I am sure a Notepad style of crude editor wold work, but I need some basic styling like font, bold, italics, etc.

What tool can I use on a Mac to write this book? I really want to be able to commit and push revisions and make my incremental changes viewable by me later.

Thanks.

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Colleen Kayter

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curiouswebster

ASKER

I already chose Git for version control. But using any version control program with a Word file is literally suicide. Word has a specific file format and once a version control program merges changes between different version of the Word file, one bit out of place destroys the file. So, at that point, you are way behind, since your files no longer work.

I need a light version of a Word document where the file format is not going to include numerous escape characters, which throw any version control program into never never land.

Colleen Kayter

I'm suggesting you NOT use Git for document version control (for the reason you stated). The first link I provided suggests some alternatives that will provide some measure of version control (Dropbox, Google) and the 2nd is about SharePoint libraries and how to turn on version control features there.

curiouswebster

ASKER

Thanks. I will check it out