I wrote my dissertation and several papers for publication using mardown + pandoc + latex. On Arch. I have to say, you're far overstating the difficulty of th

I wrote my dissertation and several papers for publication using mardown + pandoc + latex. On Arch. I have to say, you're far overstating the difficulty of this arrangement, and understating the benefits. As long as you're willing to accept the haskell package madness, which pacman takes care of for you, everything else works in a very straightforward manner. The trick is, you don't have pandoc generate straight through to PDF. You treat pandoc as a preprocessor, have it generate tex. Then your main LaTeX source file boils down to a bunch of \usepackages and \includes. I pulled it all together with a very simple makefile. The markdown source is a great deal more readable -- all of those little substitutions that seem inconsequential individually add up to a lot less noise in your document source. Equations just pass through to LaTeX, so you write them the same. All of my floats started out using markdown syntax, which is really beneficial when drafting, since much harder to mess up a single line when cutting and pasting it around. In the end, I wanted finer control over how they looked, so I pasted the generated tex into my sources and worked from there. My one caveat is, you absolutely must understand LaTeX first, or you will be in for a bad time. Pandoc + markdown + LaTeX is no substitute for understanding LaTeX, but it's a huge win if you're already familiar with LaTeX and you're tired of typing backslashes. Finally, the recommendation to use article is unfortunate. Memoir will save you a lot of headaches.