The latter point is the reason I stopped using LaTeX even though I was proficient enough years past to type up lecture notes in realtime during class with little thought (lots of math). Collaboration with it requires everyone involved to know it.
With my adviser and collaborators, I ended up compiling PDFs, printing them, and then they would mark them up by hand because that was fastest. It was not ideal by any stretch.
Word has it's faults (cough figure placement and cross-references), but track changes and adding comments to the manuscript is just spot on and easy. Getting comments and revisions done in Word is just an order of magnitude easier, and just leaves me at the end to make sure all the figures are positioned properly with captions. And now that Word finally seems to have gotten Styles and sections working properly (so many horrible disasters with this in previous iterations) it's pretty workable for technical documents.
Even the equation editor now very nearly straight up accepts latex markup for the math to the point where it's good enough for all but heavy theory papers.
But with LaTeX, asking your busy adviser to look at the compiled output, and then mark up a separate file they have to parse in their head to comment on is just too much effort.
With my adviser and collaborators, I ended up compiling PDFs, printing them, and then they would mark them up by hand because that was fastest. It was not ideal by any stretch.
Word has it's faults (cough figure placement and cross-references), but track changes and adding comments to the manuscript is just spot on and easy. Getting comments and revisions done in Word is just an order of magnitude easier, and just leaves me at the end to make sure all the figures are positioned properly with captions. And now that Word finally seems to have gotten Styles and sections working properly (so many horrible disasters with this in previous iterations) it's pretty workable for technical documents.
Even the equation editor now very nearly straight up accepts latex markup for the math to the point where it's good enough for all but heavy theory papers.
But with LaTeX, asking your busy adviser to look at the compiled output, and then mark up a separate file they have to parse in their head to comment on is just too much effort.