This problem is now solved for me. I didn’t do anything. Either a Firefox (current version 137.0.2 on mobile) or a Lemmy update (current version BE: 0.19.11) seems to have solved it.

I would stay away from YAML (almost at all costs).

For us to be able to help you, I think you need to give us some more details about the organization of your work. If each chapter is a separate text file, then you don’t really need to do any branching at all (assuming people will only make changes on their own files and not touch others’ work). If it is a single text file, branching (or anything else, to be honest) will not help much.

I assume chapters will have their separate files. As long as you can control who touches which file, everybody can work on the same branch (also referred to as “trunk based”). But if you fear that people may interfere with each other’s work (willingly or by accident), then it makes sense to create a branch per chapter to keep contributors at a distance from each other. But working on a single repository requires some sort of an agreement on the workflow.