I worked for law firm in the mid-90s who developed a robust set of Word styles that were pretty much required internally and made for nice, consistent documents (and could even be applied pretty well to documents from the outside). Now I work for people who work heavily with Word and wouldn't know a style if it bit them in the ass.
The best are when people are working in the blown-out remains of something that was once a wonderfully-styled and designed document (if you know what ALT-F9 does, you know the type).
I've spent hours moving over the info into a clean template; it's not worth fighting the blown-out version.
Agreed. At that point, LaTeX not only all but requires you to use styles, .tex files are text-based for easy version control.
I wouldn't necessarily say I'd endorse LaTeX for collaboration per se among people who don't normally use it, but I think it points the way toward what a good collaborative writing tool would look like.
For all of its faults "GitHub markdown" works decently well for collaborative writing; the number of people who are willing to learn LaTeX just to work on a document is way too small compared to the number who would greatly have their life made easier by doing so.
Again, agreed on all counts. Unfortunately, however, while Markdown (any flavor you choose) is pretty great for writing text, it's really limited in the types of formatting you can do, hence also the types of documents you can create.
That leads you down one of two routes:
1. Massively extend Markdown so it can do a large-ish subset of what LaTeX can do, or
2. Slightly extend Markdown so it can do enough to be useful, but nowhere near what LaTeX can.
I don't see a great way to do option 1 without making something that's nearly as complex as LaTeX. Option 2 doesn't seem all that great to me, except maybe as a gateway drug to LaTeX.
Maybe I'm thinking about it all wrong here, but it seems like Markdown itself sits at or near some local optimum of complexity vs utility that's pretty strongly attracting in the sense that going too far away from that point makes you lose the thing that makes Markdown attractive in the first place.
Even WP didn't really get Reveal Codes on their own program right when they went to Windows. That tool is just way more appropriate for monospaced terminals instead of WYSIWYG.
I find Word becomes much more manageable if you religiously use styles instead of ad-hoc formatting.