No apologies needed. The timing is pretty good, we were going to do it in two weeks or so. We've been working on this for about a year now and for the first 8 or 9 months I was telling people that it was usable but not useful. I think it crossed the barrier into useful a few months ago.
I don't know if you've noticed, but we also give the option to write in Markdown. Citations work too, as long as you put them in Latex style, ie \cite{synparb}. Markdown is nearly powerful enough to write a full-featured article, and Latex is clearly overpowered. I like the idea of extending Markdown to give it everything one would need to write an article, without all of the excess.
I've played around with Markdown a bit, especially in writing computatable documents using the IPython notebook. I've actually been hoping to use either Markdown or reST along with pandoc to write a future paper, but I need to do more testing to make sure the conversion is as robust as advertised. But hopefully if Authorea solves the collaboration issue, then I'll have a viable alternative to that approach.
Markdown + pandoc is viable for writing now. I'm doing my thesis with it. Although the citation support gave me the shits so I wrote my own citation markup extension (incomplete - https://github.com/singingfish/Citeproc-Markdown ).
IPython looks amazing. I haven't personally used it yet but it appears to bring most of the Mathematica-notebook goodness over to the python community. The one thing it is lacking, which is admittedly pretty hard to implement, is Mathematica style equation entry. I can input an equation in Mathematica much faster than I can in Matlab or python.
Markdown is a real pleasure to use. One of my favorite features is that it is easy on the eyes. I was never in love with the Latex syntax.
This is excellent. I am writing my phd dissertation right now, and wrote my own variant of markdown to generate it! I wholeheartedly agree! You guys have the right design spirit and vision. Take it forward, and grow a little bolder! Make versions that uniquely take advantage of the web for READING, not just for WRITING!
At the moment it is mostly GitHub-flavored markdown. We did consider Pandoc-flavor, but for the time being we are sticking to GitHub's. We might change it slightly. So far, 80% of our users have authored in LaTeX so we have been busy supporting that
And does your university accept the thesis in the format you output to? The requirements here are quite specific, even LaTeX is nontrivial to set up to fulfill them.
I don't know if you've noticed, but we also give the option to write in Markdown. Citations work too, as long as you put them in Latex style, ie \cite{synparb}. Markdown is nearly powerful enough to write a full-featured article, and Latex is clearly overpowered. I like the idea of extending Markdown to give it everything one would need to write an article, without all of the excess.
I hope you try this out on your collaborators.