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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2079 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 13, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Coming in at a sum total of 56 pages of Times New Roman 12 point font, including footnotes, in-text citations, tables of contents and authorities, not including appendices, I have finished my three final essays for the semester. One of these essays went through at least 12 distinct versions, the real number is probably closer to 15, but I have 12 saved in that folder so 12 is the number I'm going with.

Fortunately I have what I sincerely hope is the easiest possible semester coming up, so I should be able to cruise to graduation.

Use git?

Yeah... Though I guess non-devs might feel most comfortable composing in Word, or google docs now? I assume a google doc has "good enough" versioning you wouldn't need to keep 12 distinct versions.

For someone who is moderately technically inclined but who needs to do custom formatting in Word, for a class or whatever, there are two options that come to mind for using git. Both slightly janky.

The first is to unzip the .docx file, and version control that in git. Gitignore docx files themselves in the repo. Without unzipping git (at least used to) treat docx containers as binary files, so you won't be able to look at diffs. Microsoft doesn't supper love you unzipping office files, so unzipping requires extra steps.

The second option that comes to mind is to compose in markdown. Maybe GitHub flavored markdown, even editing a gist on girhub from your preferred browser. Or whatever your favorite markdown editor is. Then convert the markdown file to a .docx via pandoc. You're not done yet though, because the docx is probably a "web document" format, so you still need to apply your paged formatting and re-save as a "regular" word doc. This biggest advantage of this to me is not the versioning using git, it's being able to make comments to myself while composing. You do have to be careful though, different flavors and versions of markdown parsers treat comments differently.

Markdown is just a middleman format. Writing in raw HTML and CSS from the beginning makes more sense.

Grats!

Can we read them

One essay is privileged, the other two probably a bit more identifying than I'm comfortable with unfortunately.

DM them to me then.

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