I don't know anyone who would ever write a manuscript as collection of text files. This is non sense.
For a book you may use one file per chapter,
for an article a unique file - always in a formatting word processor. Sure, it would be nice to have a version control system working transparently withing the word processor, namely recognizing changes paragraph by paragraph.
For a book you may use one file per chapter, for an article a unique file - always in a formatting word processor. Sure, it would be nice to have a version control system working transparently withing the word processor, namely recognizing changes paragraph by paragraph.