How to Track Legal Document Changes with Git (And Why It Breaks)

If you've ever tried to diff two versions of a legal document, you know the pain. Word's "Track Changes" is a nightmare, PDF diffs are basically useless, and by the time you figure out what actually changed between v3 and v7 of a contract, you've mass-consumed coffee and lost the will to live. So when I saw the legalize-es project on Hacker News — Spanish legislation tracked as a Git repository — my first thought was: "Obviously. Why isn't everything done this way?" My second thought, after actually trying to build something similar for a client's compliance docs, was: "Oh. That's why." Let me walk you through the real problems you'll hit when storing legal or regulatory text in Git, and how to solve them. The Core Problem: Legal Text Isn't Code Git was designed for source code — short lines, clear structure, mostly ASCII. Legal documents are long paragraphs, deeply nested numbering schemes, and full of special characters. When you naively dump a law into a .txt file and start committi