Subj : Future of ftsc.org web site
To   : August Abolins
From : andrew clarke
Date : Tue Feb 16 2021 14:44:04

15 Feb 21 13:21, you wrote to me:

 ac>> I've uploaded an unofficial(*) repo here:

 ac>> https://github.com/zoomosis/ftsc

 AA> That is very nice!  The search is wonderful.  It even seems to
 AA> do boolean searches.

Yes, "Advanced search" is great.

 AA> It found "^apath" in all 8 documents.  The search @ftsc.org
 AA> found none; I had to enter "apath" without the caret to get the
 AA> a positive search.

 AA> But a nice feature of the ftsc.org search is that it lists the
 AA> titles of the documents next to the doc number in the results
 AA> list.

 AA> Can github be adjusted to do the same?

Probably not without renaming the files to include titles, which obviously isn't practical.

 ac>> (*) I am not an FTSC member

 AA> Thanks for the initiative of the github thing.

 AA> Is there a similar (and free) thing that is designed for
 AA> managing document versions? (and not one that is designed for
 AA> code?)

Google Docs can do versioning but it's clunky.

Git can handle binaries but "git diff" won't show you much for non-text documents, only that a file has changed:

$ git diff
diff --git a/foobar.pdf b/foobar.pdf
index f5d671a..82ac402 100644
Binary files a/foobar.pdf and b/foobar.pdf differ

Conceivably a web site like GitHub could hook into the "diff" part to display something more useful, but a common alternative is to write your documents in MarkDown (which is basically just plain text with benefits). Then you only export to HTML/PDF when you need to. I use Pandoc for that.

Obviously Markdown is not going to work for spreadsheets or graphics. Though I'm not sure how you'd represent "diff" of a spreadsheet or a graphics file anyway. :)

--- GoldED+/BSD 1.1.5-b20180707
 * Origin: Blizzard of Ozz, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (3:633/267)

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