What should I do if I put MS Office (e.g. .docx) or OpenOffice( e.g. .odt) document into a git repository?

Question

I put several .docx, .txt and .pdf file into a .git repository. I can open, edit, save the local .docx file; however, when I push it to github, and download it back to my computer, Word complains that it cannot open it.

In order to store .docx file on github, is there some essential steps I should do to the git settings?

Answer 1

Solution

Make a .gitattributes file in your working directory and add the following line to it:

*.docx    binary

Why not just set core.autocrlf=false ?

This is useful too. But configuring .docx as a binary format solves not only this problem, but also potential merge issues.

What is the origin of this problem?

From http://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes , section "Marking files as binary". Note the italicized section.

Git usually guesses correctly whether a blob contains text or binary data by examining the beginning of the contents. However, sometimes you may want to override its decision, either because a blob contains binary data later in the file, or because the content, while technically composed of text characters, is opaque to a human reader.

.docx format is a zip folder containting xml and binary data, such as images.

Git treated your .docx as a text (and not binary) file and replaced endline characters. As Microsoft-developed format, .docx is probably using CRLF, which might have been replaced with LF in the remote repository. When you downloaded that file directly from remote, it still had LFs.

In a binary file Git never replaces endline chars, so even the files on remote repository will have proper CRLFs.

Applicable formats

This is applicable to any file format which is a zipped package with text and binary data. This includes:

• OpenDocument: .odt, .ods, .odp and others.
• OpenOffice.org XML: .sxw, .sxc, .sxi and others.
• Open Packaging Conventions .docx, .xlsx, .pptx and others.

Answer 2

The problem here is most likely a GitHub web interface quirk whereby your attempt to download the file actually produced an HTML page about the file. Using clone will, as you found, work fine.