I work in a lab which publishes in both CS and biology journals. Biologists require Word. Most our people hate it more than LaTeX, since in LaTeX it is at least difficult to break the template accidentally. Often the writing starts in GDocs, then gets moved to LaTeX, then converted to Word and cleaned up manually.

I'd love Word if it had that one feature, disable direct formatting, to enable changing formatting only through styles.

BTW Latex with embedded Markdown is a rather pleasant combo after you have it set up properly.

Word has that feature. Type "Protect Document" into the search bar, then select "limit formatting to a selection of styles" in the options toolbar that shows up on the right hand.

It is like asking developers to write html pages and code in Word.

Proprietary payware that doesn't support Linux and doesn't work with Git?

For current users of LaTeX, it's dead in the water.

> other answer would be to say that’s why you have grad students .

Of which discipline?

Any of them. Professors generally chase grants to fund grad students who need tasks to get a PhD.

A lot of journal and conferences accept Word file (and provide MS Word template). My dad published tens of papers per year in biology and he doesn't even know what LaTeX is. However, for Maths/Physics/CS, a lot of people just find LaTeX to be faster overall (me included, I began using LaTeX simply because I was too tired to typeset my equation in MS Word)

> This is going to be really unpopular but you could allow people to write their papers in Microsoft word .

Many journals do allow Word submissions. Nature, for example[0]

[0] "we strongly encourage you to incorporate the manuscript text and figures into a single PDF or Microsoft Word file" https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/initial-submission

Word is the preferred format in many fields.

In my field, Word is preferred for conference submissions, because the tight page limits (2-3 pages) is easier to work with in a WYSIWYG editor.

Word with a template is the easiest way I've found to write scientific papers.

I don't trust articles written in Word.