I am currently working on a project with multiple people via github. For the code this works as expected. however we also have to write a report and would like to do this in the same repository.

The problem now is that while the merging of different changes works great with the tex file, even the simplest changes create problems while merging the pdf file (as expected).

Our solution so far has been to add *.pdf files to the .gitignore. However this leads to us having to recompile the output before being able to view it, which would just be more convenient in case we would simply want to check the newest changes in the pdf.

Is there a way to prevent git from trying to merge the changes in the pdf and simply overwriting the existing file with the new version while merging the .tex file?

I know this is not a terrible solution, I’m simply looking for a more elegant solution.