I’m version controlling every formatted text document I have in OpenDocument Flat XML Document (FODT) format to have a chance at seeing the history and possibly doing some automated cleanup. However, any change to the document causes attributes elsewhere in the file to change. For example:
<text:h [-text:style-name="P55"-]{+text:style-name="P41"+} text:outline-level="1">
How do I work around this issue so that diffs are as small as possible?
tdf#88298
As a partial aid, you might want to disable RSIDs, which serve to make version comparisons easier and more useful, but add the XML noise.
After doing that the git diff | wc -l of one of my documents went down by a factor of ~5 between saves, but a 112 line diff when saving an unchanged 4-page, 800-word document is still awful.
Formatting method may also play an important role in the “noise”. Using styles results in a more “stable” XML encoding than direct formatting. Have you checked this effect?