Hi there,
Please allow me to ask a cliche question. I was using LaTex for scientific manuscript writtings, it was painful not only due to the syntax but also never easy for coauthors to comment. Not all of my coauthors know latex and even for those who know it are requesting Word format because it's much easier to read and comment. In the end, to revise the comments, I have to put a commented Word or PDF document on the side and edit LaTex on the other side. I don't think this is the modern way of doing collaborative writing and it is even worse than just use Word or google doc all the time. Both of them could show comments and provide a bit of version control and no requires no learning.
I feel so so lucky that I found rticles package which really makes me want to come back to plaintext editing for my current project. The main advantage from my point of view is that the finished script is much more readable than LaTex which I think everyone even without programming experience could just read it as a document like Word. The only thing left is a version control tool to allow everybody to comment directly on the Rmd file and in the meantime easy to learn or not even need to learn. I wonder if you have nice solutions for it? Github is nice, but not everyone knows how to use it and it takes time to learn. Maybe I could put the Rmd file in google doc? or is there any tool to comment on HTML format with version control?
Thanks a lot,
Zhengchen