hbons/SparkleShare — Issue #521: Intelligent Office/Openoffice zipped XML file support
Author: lgordon
Created: 2012-01-11 18:37:13+00:00
State: open

MS office and Open/libreoffice files (docx, odt, etc) files are zipped directory files which contain xml files to describe the document along with any incorporated media (images, movies, etc). Since these are compressed each time they are edited this constantly takes up more and more space in the git history. It would be much more efficient to track changes to the extracted files and then let git do the compressing and revision history. This would also provide much better history tracking. You could see when images are added to the document, which portion is changed, etc.

I'm not sure how easy this would be to make work seamlessly but if you can just unzip the docx each time it changes and commit that instead of committing the zipped binary archive.

Maybe there is also a gitattributes way to do it...

more info:

http://monkeyonoracle.blogspot.com/2010/03/docx-part-i-how-to-extract-document.html

http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/opendocument/