I know some people who could answer some of your questions, at least 
they can work with InDesign.
For the source control part...
Both .docx and .odt are in fact zip containers that contain the images 
and the content in different files. In theory you could extract the 
content part, put that under revision control. Check out the content, 
change, check in and rebuild the zipfile. Plus some manual fixing, but 
that would be minimal. If InDesign has the same sort of filestructure 
you might give that a try. Alternatively, many programs nowadays support 
version control. Did you check if InDesign does?


On 14-6-2014 13:42, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> Does anybody here know anything about Adobe InDesign?
>
> Our product manual is produced with it. The manual has always been the
> most neglected part of our product, so some while ago, management got
> the Graphics department to redo the manual. And by "redo", I mean "make
> it look like a glossy magazine".
>
> The manual is very, very pretty. I can't even explain it in words
> properly. I can't put my finger on *what* exactly is so good about it,
> but it just *looks professional*. It looks really slick. I could have
> wasted hundreds of hours buggering around with formatting commands and
> still not come up with anything remotely this good-looking.
>
> I guess that's what happens when you pay professional graphic artists to
> make your stuff look good!
>
> The trouble is... the actual *content* of the manual is awful. (The
> Graphics department only changed the formatting, not the content.) Half
> of it is three point-releases out of date. There are new features that
> aren't explained anywhere. The manual is huge and intimidating, and very
> poorly organised. The English is poor in many places. Some irrelevant
> things are explained in unnecessary detail, while other important
> information is barely explained at all. In short, it sucks.
>
> We all know it sucks. But it would take a long time for somebody to
> write something better. And there's people banging on the door wanting
> new software features, so...
>
> Anyway, I don't think anybody here actually knows how to *use* InDesign.
> Oh, various people have got it to "work", but I don't think any of us
> know how to use it properly. The Graphics department have built a
> document that looks beautiful, but it's intractably difficult to
> *change* anything. The table of contents was produced by hand (I can
> tell from the inconsistent typos), the running titles on the pages were
> produced by hand, all the cross-references were done manually (several
> of them are incorrect), and so on. It appears that to add a new page,
> you basically copy-paste an existing page and then edit the contents to
> make it different. (And then go edit the page numbers on all the
> succeeding pages.)
>
> What we *really* want to do is put the manual into source control.
> But... well, putting a binary blob into source control doesn't really
> help much. You *can* put a Word document into source control, but it's
> impossible to tell what got changed on each commit, so why bother?
>
> What we actually want to do is write some sort of "source code" which
> contains the textual content of the manual and some markup instructions,
> and then press a button somewhere, and have a glossy magazine drop out
> the other end. Can InDesign do that? Or do we need to find another tool?
>
> (We could use LaTeX - but it makes your document look like a stuffy
> academic publication rather than a trendy commercial product brochure.
> I've been looking into DocBook, but the PDF output looks *awful*! Like,
> even MS Word looks less chunky than this stuff! Perhaps we could use a
> custom XML schema and I could code up some suitable XSLT for it... but I
> very much doubt that my coding skills can match the talent of
> professional graphics designers.)
>
> Everything I've managed to read about InDesign (i.e., not much) says
> it's brilliant for producing posters and flyers. E.g., the product page
> talks about "pixel perfect" design - which is what you want if you're
> designing one poster, once. But I'm not seeing anything about
> automatically processing big chunks of existing text into a pretty
> document. Maybe it can't do that...


-- 
Everytime the IT department forbids something that a researcher deems
necessary for her work there will be another hole in the firewall.

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