What Workflow Alternatives for Writing Science Are there Apart from?

What workflow alternatives for writing science are there apart from LaTeX to PDF?

LaTeX is dead! I am a Physicist, I have written many reports, my master and my PhD thesis in LaTeX. I used BibTex for References, those reports were hundreds of pages. I used it on Windows and on Linux, with different Text-editors and for several years. I am quite experienced with it. Like all the others here, I defended LaTex to the bone, mostly because of how awful MS Word is. And after my PhD, maybe even before, ditching LaTex would have probably saved me a lot of time. The first time, you write down an equation in Latex, you will be amazed, and the way mathematical expressions look in the final document is nice. However, here comes my list, why LaTex is a no go. Nobody is using it. Not even in science. It is not true, that journals do not accept word documents, on the contrary, t do. Because t know about, especially older scientist, that are quite awkward on a computer. T get it right with word, because t get what t see. And this is what makes things worse. When you work alone on your PhD, it might maybe go through, but in real life, even in Science, a project is team work. Look at a standard paper, there are at least three authors. If one of them (likely you older boss) thinks that LaTeX is some S-M thing, then you can’t use it, because he will not be able to edit your work. And this is how it is. we work in teams. It takes a lot of time to get things right and you have to become an expert in TypeSetting. Each modification will take ages. Alone changing a Font is not natural, and if you don’t know how, chances are high that you will have to google it. Keep on, and I will tell you the things that you don’t know how to do. page numbers, on the left and right for even and uneven pages, but not on the title page; figures that are centered, tables! OMG, tables. You cannot copy paste a table from excel. Editing tables in LaTex is awful. Especially if you will have to modify the entries afterwords. Formulas are supposed to be easy, but it actually is complicted, and the way you type things, is not natural. For example if you want to write x = 5m, you will have to take into account that the space between 5 and m is slightly smaller than a standard spacebar, and that will need an extra symbol. It might get as bad as $x = 5/unit{m}$ …. do you get it? Imagine how complicated this can get, especially if there is an error that you will have to debug. The debugger is not handy at all and the error messages are mostly without any meaning. This automatic way LaTex handles the space is actually not working. To often the best solution it proposes is to put all the text and append figures and tables in the end. Too often it puts figures so far away from the content the refer to. Nobody wants to google each feature and include the right package to get something simple done, maybe only once in the whole document. And nobody wants to read a manual of that package, that is 20 pages long. There is also literally no convention across the packages. Some are badly commented on top. UTF-8! Oh god, only a few years ago, when you were writing a document in French, each é, à, ç came out wrong, you had to install some package. Actually LaTex pretends that the user can focus on the content of the document instead of struggling with formatting, but it is just the opposite. All those clumsy commands will do that you actually do struggle with formatting and compile the document over and over again instead of writing the content. When you are looking for a job in industry, you should not even mention LaTex on your CV, because it shows a big lack of understanding of industry standards and productivity oriented procedures. And in the real world, nobody cares, that your documents are beautiful. The content will make the difference. If you have an amazing discovery, some incredible investment idea with a ROI of 25%, nobody will reject it because your fonts are ugly. Believe me, if you prove Riemann’s hypothesis, nobody will complain that your solution does not “look nice” and that you should have done it with LaTex. So what’s left? I am sorry, from my point of view, there is nothing in the market! Latex, no. Word? Awful, buggy, heavy on ressources, closed source, closed data format. Interopperability with excel is buggy. Try to modify something in an excel file and make it automatically appear in your word document. LibreOffice pretends to be a 1.1 replacement of MS Office, but it is not, and it has many bugs. Google docs wants to be innovative, but you end up googling a lot to get this cool GUI done what you want. I am sorry, there is nothing for typeSetting. And you know why? Because it’s not your job to do that. If you write a book ,write it. The editor will do the typesetting anyway. It’s his job.