There are a few nice things about Latex for scientific publications:
1. It's style driven. I'm not sure how well you can do this is Word now. But in Latex it's pretty easy to reformat your document to match a journal or thesis style.
2. It's scriptable. I don't mean that it's Turing complete. But you can drive it with a Makefile. This is great for scientific publications I've found. You can script it such that Make will re-build you tools, re-run analysis, generate new figures, and then regenerate the article. This save a lot of time when you're iterating over a publication.
3. Well integrated reference management. Bibtex itself is a mess, but if you don't need to alter the reference format, it works well.
4. Equations!
I think it's probably overkill for what he's doing. Sounds like Markdown + a reference manager would be fine for him. But for a lot of scientific publications it has handy features. I too would like to find something else, but I've not seen anything.
I guess you could write everything in HTML! But it's obviously not well suited to this application.
1. has been possible in Word for ages (according to an article recently on the front page, it's been the main difference between Word and WordPerfect), and it's pretty much how you write documents of any size without going insane. I'm actually astonished how many people think that using Word means using direct formatting and eschewing styles.
I really wish people would use word's features - having the entire document marked up with appropriate headings makes its a breeze to go through and restyle a document.
I find that while collaborating on things, I have to make a pass that involves purely going through and marking up heading text appropriately.
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I've found the best compromise is to have a sort of technical prologue that discusses how to edit the document, or forcing people to work in something like markdown where the lack of font sizes force the use of a heading class notation.
I prefer https://stackedit.io/editor because it includes mathjax support which means you get access to a large swath of LaTeX style math tools.
1. It's style driven. I'm not sure how well you can do this is Word now. But in Latex it's pretty easy to reformat your document to match a journal or thesis style.
2. It's scriptable. I don't mean that it's Turing complete. But you can drive it with a Makefile. This is great for scientific publications I've found. You can script it such that Make will re-build you tools, re-run analysis, generate new figures, and then regenerate the article. This save a lot of time when you're iterating over a publication.
3. Well integrated reference management. Bibtex itself is a mess, but if you don't need to alter the reference format, it works well.
4. Equations!
I think it's probably overkill for what he's doing. Sounds like Markdown + a reference manager would be fine for him. But for a lot of scientific publications it has handy features. I too would like to find something else, but I've not seen anything.
I guess you could write everything in HTML! But it's obviously not well suited to this application.