I’m working on an Open Office document with a partner and we are using subversion to collaborate on it. However, we are saving the document as a .odt file and subversion reads this as a binary file type. Therefore it has me worrying that when we go to merge the files and the diff pops up that we will not be able to adequately perform the merges if there are conflicts; we won’t be able to understand the raw .odt file.
So my question is “How do I save a document in Open Office so that it retains all of the formatting you would expect and want but does save as a binary file and therefore can be easily merged?”
Or am I using the wrong method to do this? (Which is more than likely)
As much as you might hate it, LaTeX provides you a means to create documents, but maintain them in subversion as text, which is easily merged.
Aside from LaTeX or just keeping txt documents, setting a Lock on the file with Subversion is your best bet.