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Most Flexible Open Office Word Document Format (Not MS Word) For Git Versioning and Collaboration

I am looking to start a collaborative word document in Git, and want to know what is the best format?

Some loose requirements I have for this document are: potential to easily add some simple markup, like bold, italics, maybe some font sizes or highlighting (nothing too technical). Ability to work seamlessly in git without too many complicated commands, as not everybody on the project will be a git guru, or may even be first time users. Something that is light

I'm already biased against Microsoft Word because I don't want to pay for it, and it has a lot of the bells and whistles I don't need, and frankly find annoying.

I'm already leaning towards using OpenOffice Writer with ODF formatting. Has anybody done this, or have any suggestions on why this is not a good idea? There are a lot of formats to choose from, like this picture:enter image description here

That is sorta overwhelming.

My reasoning for using OpenOffice is that it's free, it can install on most computers, and it is open source. This project is open source as well, and it seems like using open source tools is true to the spirit.

I know this is not a discussion forum, and I truly am looking for a definitive answer on file type, or some suggestions from anybody who has experience versioning word / text documents in Git. It's totally out of the question to use SVN in this project, mainly because it sucks. Thanks!

updated: The idea would be to version this in Github

The project is about engineers, linguists, and other programmers who are interested in cleaning up, standardizing and overall improving the kind of language we use to refer to computer language concepts.

There is a great suggestion below about using Markdown like in Github README's, which sounds awesome to me, but I'm not sure if this would scare non-github, non computer tech savvy people away.

Solution

  • I decided to go with a wiki at wikispaces. I feel like it met all of my needs. I will summarize some of the pros and cons of using either.

    Github pros:

    • Awesome community and collaboration

    Github cons:

    • Not super easy to use (although that is debatable)

    Wiki pros:

    • Easy to use for all kinds of different people

    Wiki cons:

    • It's ugly, I don't like the versioning system, and the community seems dull.

    Ultimately I had to choose ease of use over all the cool features of Github.

    I should give credit to @Karl above.

    I really appreciate all the help, and took a lot from this. Especially learned about some cool features of Github.

    Thanks!