> If it's about Word and LibreOffice not playing well with text-based diff typically used by version control systems, then maybe the problem is with the file formats used by Word and LibreOffice.

Text-based diff requires you to make a number of assumptions:

  1. I'm writing a plain text file
  2. The text file is broken up into multiple lines, each with distinct statements/expressions

Compare that to composing a multi-media file:

  1. I'm writing a document with plain text, graphics, possibly video, possibly sound, together on one page
  2. The text may not be distinct statements/expressions on different lines
  3. The media may change incrementally or wholly
  4. The layout on the page may change incrementally or wholly

Some multimedia document formats have a text form (ODF is zipped XML), but it still has different assumptions from the text-based diff. An intelligent program understands when the formatting has only changed slightly, without having line-by-line assumptions. Word & LibreOffice already have such version control/diffing built in. So the technology already exists, but we're not applying it in a way that makes it convenient to store these documents with our other versioned/diffed documents.

What we need is a way to combine different methods of diffing/versioning different kinds of files within one contextual view. The one view would allow you to view code diffs/Word diffs/image diffs/etc from one interface, and push/pull/share them to some kind of remote repository. Like Artifactory, but less terrible.