UPDATE: Be sure to read the comments below, and my response

As a newly-minted PhD student, I was talking with a friend about writing papers.  “Use LaTeX”, he said.  I thought he meant the rubbery material commonly found in lab gloves.  But apparently not.  LaTeX (pronounced “lay-tech”) is typesetting software that he used for writing papers.

Eager to be on the cutting edge of scholarship, I spent a few days learning how LaTeX worked, how to insert symbols, figures, and tables.  I even produced my thesis proposal with it.  But my supervisor used Word exclusively, and I had no compelling reason to use LaTeX over Word, so I switched back.

Fast-forward a few years.  Now, everyone should be using markdown in a plain text editor, doing statistics in R, uploading versions to github or figshare, and managing citations with JabRef, BibTex or Mendeley.  Apparently, Word, Excel, Endnote, and SPSS are…