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<h1>Using vimdiff for editing fiction and revision tracking</h1>
<p>I’ve been on a story writing kick for about a year now. Actually, one
of my goals this year was to write at least one short story per
month.</p>
<p>Aside: so far I’m doing pretty good, I wrote four stories in January
and another in March. I’m also working on a serial web fiction!</p>
<p>Anyway, one of the things that I think a lot of writers will need to
deal with at some point is editor revisions. Not that this is a bad
thing, I’m very thankful for the awesome folks at Nat1 Publishing for
giving me feedback. Their edits always make my writing better and I’m
learning a lot.</p>
<p>Now that I’ve stated the obvious, I have one workflow gripe. That is
they require Word documents (.docx) for submissions. Now I write
everything in vim, format it with Markdown, track it with git, and
that’s that. Plain text all the way. When someone wants a Word doc or a
PDF, I just Pandoc it away into the format they want and ship it
off.</p>
<p>Normally this is plenty fine, everybody is happy. But when I get
edits back, almost always the changes are tracked in Word’s change
tracker. The LibreOffice Write equivalent would be the Compare Document
feature.</p>
<figure>
<p>
<img
src="https://nextcloud.53hor.net/index.php/s/rZMSscgxYDfKZT7/preview"
alt="Write compare document" />
<figcaption aria-hidden="true">Write compare document</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>So for a few stories now I’ve gone through the process of opening up
LibreOffice, comparing documents, and then stepping through the changes
one at a time, accepting or rejecting what was there. Sometimes I make
edits which combine the two changes. It’s a bit cumbersome because
Write’s keyboard shortcuts aren’t that great for this feature. I also
don’t have Word on my swanky new Commodore OS Vision, so the clicking
continued.</p>
<p>Until I realized I’m basically using LibreOffice as a merge tool.
That gave me the idea that I really don’t need to use Write at all, I
just need another translation layer.</p>
<p>What I did was convert the .docx I got back from the editors into
markdown with Pandoc. Pandoc is really good at handling things like em
dashes with its own flavor of Markdown, so this wouldn’t be a
problem.</p>
<pre><code>pandoc -o stardust_edited.md stardust_edited.docx</code></pre>
<p>Then I made a copy of my original story and called it “final.” Now I
could use both files in vimdiff to track my changes.</p>
<pre><code>vimdiff -o stardust_edited.md stardust_final.md</code></pre>
<figure>
<p>
<img
src="https://nextcloud.53hor.net/index.php/s/YkRbbM64Lzx67w7/preview"
alt="Vimdiff" />
<figcaption aria-hidden="true">Vimdiff</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>This might surprise strangers to vimdiff, but all of the same tools I
was using in Write were already available. Only now they were better for
a couple of reasons.</p>
<p>First, vimdiff supports a two-pane view with the editors’ copy on top
and my original (now final) copy on the bottom. Blocks of text with
modifications are highlighted magenta, while the actual changed
characters are highlighted red. This makes it really clear what’s mine,
what’s theirs, and what the final result (un-highlighted) will look
like.</p>
<p>Second, and most importantly, I get to use vim’s diff mode
keybindings. <code>]c</code> jumps to the next change while
<code>[c</code> jumps back a change. <code>dp</code> will push the
currently highlighted change into my final copy, while <code>do</code>
will reject it, or place my original change into the editors’ copy.</p>
<p>This let me move through the document much faster with tools I’m way
more comfortable with. When I was finished, I just used Pandoc to turn
the final draft back into a .docx and sent it to the editors. I gave it
a final read just to make sure I didn’t miss anything in the conversion,
but there wasn’t anything really special about the formatting.</p>
<figure>
<p>
<img
src="https://nextcloud.53hor.net/index.php/s/a3nCNEeBAiEG4s7/preview"
alt="Final draft" />
<figcaption aria-hidden="true">Final draft</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>
<p>And there you have it, easy vimdiff change tracking for when people
send you Word documents. About the only thing this doesn’t get me is
comments, and for that LibreOffice hangs around on my install. Maybe
there’s a way to extract the comments and associate them with lines in
the resulting text. There are some projects, like <a
href="https://github.com/qq3g7bad/pandoc-comment-extractor">this one</a>
which are designed to extract comments as a Pandoc plugin. I’m sure it
could be worked into this solution, maybe with a nice script to tie it
all together. But that’s for another time.</p>
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