(Pre-)Historical context is distracting

[plantarum]

I found the first few paragraphs a little forced. I'm not sure a whirlwind tour of the history of typesetting is the best setup for your thesis. Highlighting the practical challenges encountered in a typical workflow for collaborating on a manuscript that combines text, figures, and code would do a better job of establishing the problem you are going to address.

Your current organization emphasizes the different approaches that have been developed to produce text, with a focus on the individual technologies. I would suggest you emphasize the process of preparing a scientific manuscript (text, citations, figures, data, code, revisions and collaboration), and the challenges that entails. Then you can introduce particular technologies as workflows for managing these challenges, rather than "here's two alternatives to WYSIWYG".

[sprossiter]

This closely echoes issue #18.

[plantarum]

@sprossiter I rather think #18 closely echoes this ;)

[sprossiter]

@plantarum Indeed; temporality was never my strong point :-)

[npch]

+1 to original comment (and all those that follow ;-)