OpenOffice and Subversion
This post takes the nerd all the way to 11. I'm in the midst of writing up a big report, and naturally, I'm using LaTeX and OpenOffice to make up the documents, so that in the event of catastrophic machine failure, I can go back into the stone age and use Linux if I get desperate. Contingency plans are where it's all at. Anyway, my boss likes reading stuff in Word format, so he can make changes to the document there, so I just really need to export from LaTeX to Word. That part isn't so much of a problem - but I'd also like to keep track of changes I'm making to the documents and the diagrams. Each word document I make for my boss should live on a branch, and then I can merge in changes from the trunk back onto the branch and so on. Thing is, I can't figure out how to get any OpenOffice document to play nicely with version control. First of all, OpenOffice uses a binary format for its data, so there is no way I can add svn keywords to the document. The second problem is that there's a long standing bug in OpenOffice draw which means that I can't insert arbitrary fields into OpenOffice.org draw documents. This means that my drawings can't have a versioning watermark on them - which is useful if I've got lots of hard copies flying around. Does anyone have any ideas how to deal with this?
1 comment
Problem solved. Unpack the OpenOffice files and stick them into the subversion. Add a $Id$ text block into your diagram, and then unpack the odg file into the version controlled directory. Check it in, and enjoy your versioned diagrams. Ideally, this would use a zip filesystem, but I can't find any binaries for MacFuse.