Roger Mason
Chris,
Chris Lott
writes: 3) PDF is my primary medium of exchange, though I would like to efficiently exchange docs with colleagues, which might mean getting them into something they can open with their beloved Microsoft Word... is there an RTF output for ConTeXt? this isn't super-high on my list, but it would be nice.
4) How about X/HTML? this is my lowest level need but, again, it would be
nice.
One option would be to use markdown with pandoc.
http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
I mostly write in ConTeXt, but if I know I must share with users of word processors then markdown + pandoc is a good option.
And to the OP's original point about academic writing, pandoc has built-in (if fairly new) citation processing. I would think it would work quite well for work in the humanities. I would give pandoc a try and see if it fits your needs, and then use TeX in some form to get PDF output. Bruce