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Comment by torrent-of-ions | Hacker News Reader

How big do you think the intersection is of people who can use git and people who want to use Microsoft Word?

It includes at least me :) I switched to Latex for writing my second master thesis because I wanted to use version control but Word is far more easier to deal with when the document include unicode character outside the BMP. So I really wanted Word + git from that time.

Also when collaborating for writing a paper with Word, version control can be a huge help.

Did you ever try Xelatex? I think it has support for arbitrary utf8 characters. Also for your system's built in fonts fallbacks is a character is missing from a font.

Why not use something like Google docs or office 365 then?

Word has way more features than GDocs. Haven't spent time with O365 but as far as I know half the draw is you can use it with Office.

I could recommend this for something like bank compliance. We're stuck with Word and have a largely non-technical staff, but could dramatically improve our performance if our documents were version controlled. If I were OP I would look banks as a launch point.

Want to? Near zero. Have to? Maybe a bit larger, hard to say.

As much as I hate having to work in Word for small things that could so easily be a plain-text format, the versioning system within Word isn't exactly the worst thing ever.

Significant.

Most engineering firms (web dev << the development world) have a need for proper documentation, and LibreOffice generally won't cut it either.

One would expect an engineering firm to be able to set up doc conversion for the special people who need "proper documentation" and consider Word to be at all related to that. Every "document" I've ever gotten from an engineer has been a PDF, which should work even for special people.

in over 20 years crossing around 10 different companies, all documentation produced has been in Word format... never a single exception other than simple text files for extremely minor stuff. Word rules the world... love it or hate it, its the truth.

As enterprises seem to take up using git, this is probably a ton better than storing Word docs in git, I think.

So not so few people :-)

i am also thinking office 360 and google docs will be taking up its space?

I like the idea, let's see how it plays out.

I love Word.

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