Mercurial

• Wikipedia Comparison of revision control software
• wikipedia Mercurial is a cross-platform, distributed revision control tool for software developers.

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• mercurial home
• quickstart
• practical guide
• Understanding Mercurial
• A Tutorial on Using Mercurial

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File:Tortoisehg-1.jpg File:Bitbucket-icon.png

TortoiseHg is Windows shell extension and GUI, from bitbucket

• tortoisehg

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• pdf: TortoiseHg Documentation Release 2.5.0

Mercurial knowhow

• Hg Init: a Mercurial tutorial
• Mercurial and Word or PDF documents

Yes.
You will be able to do meaningful diffs for MS Word documents.
   If you have TortoiseHg installed and you have set up a repository, right-click the file for which you want to check the diffs.
   On the context menu, click TortoiseHg > Visual Diffs.
   In the Visual Diffs dialog, select docdiff, instead of kdiff3.
   Double-click the file in the Visual Diffs dialog.
MS Word will open a Compare Result Word document, which will show the differences between the current version of the document 
and the previous version as Tracked Changes.

For Pdf files, I was able to get the GPL licensed DiffPDF hooked up to do comparisons between revisions of pdf files.
I added the following to my mercurial.ini file:
[extdiff]
cmd.pdfdiff = [\path\to\diffpdf.exe]
opts.pdfdiff= -a $local $other

[diff-patterns]
**.pdf=pdfdiff

Now when I click on the pdf file in tortoisehg (or use hg pdfdiff at the cmd line), 
it opens the two files for comparison. Since my pdf's tend to  contain images, 
I use the appearance comparer (-a in opts). If you have mostly text, you can use -w instead.
 
It defaults to highlighting to show the diffs. I prefer the Src Xor Dest option for displaying the differences, 
but I don't think there is a cmd line option for that.

• Mercurial ZipdocExtension

• Encode/decode filter for version controlling zipped document formats like docx or odt as uncompressed zip archives. This improves delta compression and results in less space consumption.