Preamble
I'm using git as a version control system for a paper that my lab is writing, in LaTeX. There are several people collaborating.
I'm running into git being stubborn about how it merges. Let's say two people have made single-word changes to a line, and then attempt to merge them. Though git diff --word-diff seems capable of SHOWING the difference between the branches word-by-word, git merge seems unable to perform the merge word-by-word, and instead requires a manual merge.
With a LaTeX document this is particularly annoying, as the common habit when writing LaTeX is to write a full paragraph per line and just let your text editor handle word wrapping when displaying for you. We are working around for now by adding a newline for each sentence, so that git can at least merge changes on different sentences within a paragraph. But it will still get confused about multiple changes within a sentence, and this makes the text no longer wrap nicely of course.
The Question
Is there a way to git merge two files "word by word" rather than "line by line"?