Speaking of academic papers, I'd love to see a focus on readability.

So many papers are just too dense for readers outside of the specific field. This can be because of the complexity of the subject matter, but I often notice unnecessary specific vocabulary and over-complicating concepts.

Because of this, it's impractical for the layman to go read academic papers outside of their field. This leads to reading some news article that attempts to summarize it, and we all know that majority of the time it's just the headline that gets read.

I think that's by design. You could argue that it's a barrier to entry, but I think it's more likely just a means of efficient communication among experts, who already complain there are too many papers to read.

Boils down to “who’s the customer for the paper?”

If it is a clique of experts, they can do what they want.

If Society is paying for it, then the customer base is arguably larger. But the current incentive system for academics and the like doesn’t reflect the needs of that (generally educated and interested) larger customer base. It’s a happy accident when those needs are met. No easier time in the history of the planet for them to be met.

I wrote my thesis with Markdown, combined with pandoc. Worked out allright. I think Overleaf supports Markdown now as well, which might be a more practical approach for those not familiar with git/make/shell.

How close does AsciiDoctor + asciidoctor-latex get to that? https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-latex

I've only been using Asciidoctor for a few weeks but I'm already an MD convert.

Oh that's also nice. I mean I also like AsciiDoctor. I think this can get close to the link I mentioned. The biggest difference is that the link I mentioned has an example of a real thesis with this markdown toolchain.

In case it's useful, this one seems to have been built specially for that use case: https://www.zettlr.com/