I&#x27;m not sure if I&#x27;ll have an opinion that isn&#x27;t commonly shared, so I figured I&#x27;d elucidate: I deeply love the simplicity of using markdown + LaTeX, however I realize that I&#x27;m somewhere on the gradient of complexity where I&#x27;m sacrificing some power for simplicity. Currently I think the tool that is used most is pandoc, and there are some offshoots that give pandoc more &#x27;academic&#x27; power, like scholdoc.<p>I&#x27;ve just been hoping that the pandoc world would progress (add more scholarly features) so that I could continue to keep my own data locally, manage it in my own vcs, and process it with a makefile.<p>The only reason I see to hop on the software as a service bandwagon is for collaborative real-time editing (and some projects benefit greatly from this). I&#x27;ll plug sharelatex for that, primarily because their model releases the software so that you can run your own if you don&#x27;t want to pay for the service.