cluelessresearch.com

Here is very common situation. You are writing a paper or report and is addicted to the all the goodies (font, bibliography, and most of all, math) LaTeX offers to the “chosen ones”. However, your coauthor or coworker is not inclined to spend the inordinate amount of time required to learn LaTeX. What do you do?

If your coauthor is willing to use something other than Word, you could convince him/her to try Lyx. Lyx is a “what you see is what you mean” editor using a LaTeX backend. My experience with it is limited, but I know people that are very happy with it. If you think you want to learn LaTeX but are afraid to take the plunge, this is a very good option.

Not everyone is happy to try new software, however. I think Markdown might provide a useful way to cooperate.

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

How does it look? You can see for yourself here. The syntax is very natural. Headings can be marked as:

A First Level Header
====================

A Second Level Header
---------------------


or as

# First Level Header

## Second Level Header


*This* is how you put emphasis. An introduction to markdown can be found here.

Once your text is ready for publication, you can convert Markdown texts into LaTeX or .rtf (among other choices) using the extremely cool Pandoc. Using Pandoc, you can use math in LaTeX style (like so: $y_{ic}=\gamma_{00}+\gamma_{10}x_{ic}+\gamma_{01}z_c+\gamma_{11}x_{ic} \cdot z_c+v_{ic}$)

Pandoc allows other LaTeX code in the text, such as tables and equations, so you can minimize the going back and forth between Markdown and LaTeX.

Would this work in a coauthoring environment? Would people freak out by the mere thought of using a markup tool? I will let you know when I try this out myself.