I recently came across this post by Chung-hong Chan on academic writing in Emacs that really annoyed me. It’s not anything that Chan said that put my back up but rather a common supposition that he mentioned that I and almost everyone else seems to accept uncritically. That supposition is that of course we can’t ask our project collaborators to learn Emacs and Org mode. No, it’s incumbent on us to learn Word or Google Docs instead.
You know what? I’m over that nonsense. I’m not going to write in Word and if you want to collaborate on a paper or article with me it’s going to be in Org mode, Markdown, or even LaTeX but not some brain-dead word processor like Word. Even if—heaven forfend—our target publisher requires Word, I will insist on a rational development language that we can convert to Word as the last step.
Really, do you want to collaborate with people who say they don’t have the necessary cognitive cycles to learn Emacs? Of course, they do have those cycles but they’d rather have you inconvenienced than them. Just say no.
Chan introduces the notion of “highest common factor” to justify Word as the lingua franca of collaboration but I submit that it’s really the “lowest common factor” and that serious collaborators should level up to at least Markdown rather than insisting everyone else stoop to Word.
Again, I’m not objecting to Chan’s article—which is, in fact, a nice exposition of how he uses Emacs for academic writing—but rather to the notion that it’s somehow incumbent on those of us using a rational writing environment to defer those who aren’t.