Hi,
- finding a writing environment that disregards formatting, is easy
to learn and easy to read while writing. 2) Some kind of support for bibliography tools should be incorporated. No hidden field functions that only work (hmm, work...) in some versions of Word and screw up everything every now and then. Plain text, please. 3) a tool that would point out where changes have been made by others. By this I mean both sublte changes like insertion of a word or a paragraph somewhere, but also more complex changes such as a sentence or a paragraph that has been moved elsewhere. 4) all this would need to keep working (for me) even when collaborating with others who prefer other tools. I very rarely write all on my own, so a solution that would only work if everybody else would use the same tools would not improve anything.
you could take a look at lyx. It's a graphical front-end to latex, which means you don't have to know latex to use it (well...most of the time at least). lyx would solve 1 and 2, and help with 4 (there are several import/export filters; I don't know how good they work, though).
Bye, Nico