[_delirium]

In my corner of CS (overlap w/ computer-music, game development, and HCI), the trend seems to be down.

One reason is that Word is actually decent for writing papers these days. I still use LaTeX mainly because I prefer to write in vim rather than in a WYSIWYG editor, but the difference in output quality is much smaller than it was 10 years ago. For example, Word does auto-hyphenation now (though it's off by default), which is necessary to make the common 2-column justified conference-paper format look at all decent. The kerning has also improved, and the reference-management story is much better than it used to be (there's a built-in reference manager that works ok, and Zotero integration is very nice). Figure placement still sucks, but it sucks in LaTeX too (in a different way).

Another reason is that when collaborating with people outside academia, they rarely know LaTeX. So I find myself writing my own papers in LaTeX, but collaborative papers in Word. Many people from industry really like Word's "track changes" mode as well.

[krupan]

I think where LaTeX still wins over GUI tools such as Word is once you figure out how to make it do what you want, the method you used is now documented right in the LaTeX source. With a GUI tool, it's hard to go back and remember exactly where you clicked and what setting you changed, especially when you pick up a document months later and ask yourself, "how did I make it look like that?"

[ht_th]

You might be interested in pandoc: it allows you to write your documents in LaTeX or Markdown and then it can automatically convert it to docx, odt, html, LaTeX, Markdown, and more. For straigtforward[0] documents this works great.

[0] documents containing text, headings, notes, figures, tables, code listings, mathematics, hyperlinks, lists, references.

[_delirium]

Interesting, thanks for pointing out the updated version of what "straightforward" means. Last time I looked at Markdown you couldn't do a lot of things I needed in it, such as figures, footnotes, and references, so I didn't give it very serious consideration. But it looks like pandoc has extended the original Markdown into some kind of Markdown++, which covers just about everything I usually need.

[Riesling]

In pandoc you can also use raw mode, which will just pass through all tex commands you use in your markdown file.

    pandoc text.md --parse-raw -t latex -o text.tex

Then you can proceed to compile this to a pdf with pdflatex.