I came across this tip on Martin Paul Eve’s blog:

In any case, the key thing that will make this viable for me is having a way to see the diffs within an OpenOffice (or LibreOffice document), so I want to share how I’ve got that working (I’m using Linux Mint).

As per the gittips wiki, I added the following to ~/.gitconfig

[diff "odf"]
      textconv=odt2txt

Then, once you’ve initialised the repository in the working directory for your new writing (“git init”), add the following to that repo’s .gitattributes file:

*.ods diff=odf
*.odt diff=odf
*.odp diff=odf

Of course, there’s always the option of writing in markdown, and converting to ODF (or HTML, or PDF) only when releasing the text.

Let me know what you think about this via email or in the public chatroom.

Tags: git, odf, odt, libreoffice, versioning