They should be writing them in asciidoc (or even markdown) and using style sheets if they really need complex formatting!!! (although at least latex is decent at typesetting and has nice defaults.)
Does asciidoc have equation typesetting support? I don't really care what I use to write my words, everything is equally good (except for LaTeX which is abnormally good at typesetting), but I care a lot about the user experience for equations, which varies widely between programs.
I always use LaTeX style equations although I think it supports MathML if you want a WYSIWYG. The LaTeX math is the main argument for it, mathtype is kind of miserable.
The reasons I prefer asciidoc to straight LaTeX are:
1) the formatting is completely seperated from the text
2) you’re insulated from the specific rendering engine (you can use PDFLaTeX or WebKit+MathJax etc.) while still getting decent equation syntax and BibTeX.
Yes. I intended that more as an abstract example for a tool that's useful to do science, but clearly not a science in of itself[1].
Though latex might still come in handy once you actually want to submit papers to journals, or for a thesis. YMMV.
[1] then again, if I remember my feeble attempts to write latex macros, maybe the emergent behaviour of common latex packages would be a good research subject? ;-)
