One solution is to eschew word processing and use a typesetting language instead. For example, I wrote the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book (http://railstutorial.org

One solution is to eschew word processing and use a typesetting language instead. For example, I wrote the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book (http://railstutorial.org/book http://railstutorial.org/book) in LaTeX and versioned it with Git. This proved useful on many occasions.