At work we use Subversion for just about all our software project data: source code, design documents, reports. Design documents are usually in MS Word, Excel and Visio. TortoiseSVN is great at using MS Word's "track changes" feature to do a graphical diff of two versions of a document.

At home, I use Linux and Subversion, and also store my ODF (OpenOffice.org) documents in Subversion. So I've been interested in getting a graphical diff feature working for these documents too, which can be started from the command line, and ideally integrated with Subversion.

Recently I found a Python script to do this in "OpenOffice / OpenDocument diff" on the Catarsis blog. That in turn was based on the OpenOffice.org diff script used in TortoiseSVN.

I wanted to make some improvements to the script:

• in the original post, the straight quotes are converted to curly quotes by the blog software, which must be reversed to get it running in Python
• filenames weren't being passed as command line parameters
• it didn't work properly on Gnome in Ubuntu, due to some invalid assumptions about whether the just-opened document has the focus in the window manager when it is opened
• it required the user to first manually start OpenOffice.org with the special parameters needed for the scripting to work

So, I've made these improvements. I've got the changes in a Mercurial repository, now hosted on bitbucket.org in the repository: cmcqueen1975/oodiff.

I have been running this on Ubuntu Linux 9.04 (Jaunty). I have not had success running it on Windows.

This script integrates nicely into Mercurial workflow using the extdiff extension. I've got it set up so I can just type hg oodiff file.odt to see how an ODF file within my Mercurial working copy has changed.

Download from Mercurial repository:

http://bitbucket.org/cmcqueen1975/oodiff/