mercurial version control with word

This is a followup to svn or mercurial version control of word documents

I potentially want multiple non-programmers to be able to use version control on word documents. I can configure mercurial to look at the unzipped docx files. What I want is as follows:

1. Read from Docx files (answered in that question, using a feature of mercurial to unzip before comparing, awesome!

2. automatically merge documents whenever there are non-colliding changes. It appears from the previous answer that this is done using comparison tools.

3. programmatically run word on the two documents if there are collisions, comparing the two.

I have manually opened one file, then another in Word to see what it was like. On my word 2004, it seems a bit buggy, but I see from reviews that the feature is much improved in 2010.

I found this link: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/command-line-switches-for-microsoft-office-word-2007-HP010164010.aspx#BM1

for command lines, and now see that I can execute the command:

winword /q /f file1.docx /f file2.docx

The q is for quiet, /f specifies a file. The docs d开发者_JS百科on't say if I can specify two files but I tried and it loads two in separate windows.

So the only thing I don't know is how to trigger word to compare the two.

Is the word interaction a fairly easy scripting job, or does it involve binary APIs that I don't want to know about, like DCOM, ActiveX, etc.

Digging around in the TortoiseHg directory, I found some examples of scripts implementing diff/merge of doc files in the diff-scripts directory. There is an [extdiff] section in Mercurial.ini that can be configured to use this scripts. This may get you started.