Feel free the point out the obvious solution to this if there is one, but is there some sort of check in/check out change tracking repo application for documents? I do some writing periodically and it would be nice to easily keep track of previous versions of my documents for later editing. It doesn’t have to be able to merge or branch or anything - just version control and comparison.
git.
It’s not just for code.
Technically, git isn’t best for binary files. It will work, but it’s not was it was made for and it’s gonna take a lot extra space.
Doesn’t LibreOffice have some kind of version control build in? I don’t work much with documents, but it seems like something advanced document editor should provide. Microsoft Word does have this kind of feature.
I believe svn uses deltas, so maybe go with that.
But I second @leoman’s suggestion to just use git as it’s the best overall VCS out there.
The only problem would be the lack of practical diffs as LO files are binaries. To work around that you can think about using Markdown (or LaTeX if you feel like learning it) instead as it’s just plain text and works just as well as LibreOffice if you don’t need fancy formatting.
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You can do pretty fancy formatting with Markdown. If you know how to do it.
you can’t play around much with alignment for example if you don’t include some HTML in it as well
On the subject of Markdown, are there any good WYSIWYG style editors for that?
You know, once again I’ve failed to look at the obvious answer first. 
Turns out LO does indeed have a built-in versioning system. It’s no Git, but it looks like it may work for my purposes.
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Nextcloud.
For those who use a snap-shotted filesystem like BTRFS, if automated snapshots are set up with snapper, restoring older versions of your documents out of the snapshot folders might actually be an elegant solution to the OP. I stood up an OpenMediaVault fileserver about a year ago where I did exactly this (note that BTRFS, and snapper is not something which OMV is eager to set up for you in any way, but it’s still possible on the command line). All fileserver users can just restore older versions of snapshotted files themselves, no need to bother an admin to restore from backups.
Personally, my own “version control system” for my Documents folder consists of pressing the Run button, which is in grsync, while I have an SD card plugged in (where any changed documents get synced to).
I speak in praise of “simpler is better”, when it comes to backing up documents, with the opportunity to roll-back one time (from said SD card).
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I’m going to get trashed for this but Google docs has a lot of features such online editing, seeing how the doc was changed, sharing the doc. I think if we somehow utilized it with api I think we could get a good system. I agree though a checkout system to collaborate on docs would be great imo