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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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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.