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I would say that the newest, and in my view most promising, trend in in the use of lightweight markup languages, specifically Markdown, reStructuredText, and ASCIIDoc. Both commercial WYSIWYG too...
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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/23392 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
I would say that the newest, and in my view most promising, trend in in the use of lightweight markup languages, specifically Markdown, reStructuredText, and ASCIIDoc. Both commercial WYSIWYG tools like FrameMaker and XML vocabularies like DocBook and DITA require complex and somewhat cumbersome editors and tend to clutter the writing experience with either formatting or structural conformance. The lightweight languages, by contrast, can be written in the text editor of your choice with little overhead, and the source format is very readable, unlike XML. All three have well supported tool chains. They don't have the capacity for structural constraints that you find in an XML application, but you did not indicate the need for that. For ease of writing a technical paper with reasonable support for things like math, using inexpensive or free tools, I would look at either reStructuredText or ASCIIDoc. (Markdown is more simplistic and more oriented to simple web pages.)