It seems to me that a lot of time writing a paper is wasted on formatting the paper to a specific journal’s format. LaTeX and BibTeX allow an author to easily change the format the paper and citations, simply by importing a new style, which the journal could easily provide.
Related to this question, because of the utility of LaTeX and BibTeX, should every student be provided with at least a basic understanding of these tools?
LaTex is certainly useful for scientific papers, not least because Word is problematic for equations, but I am not sure that there is ever an advantage to decreasing the choice available to people. Constraining people's options would tie them to LaTex which would be likely to work against future development of a better alternative. Publishing houses should, of course, strive to meet the needs of the community they purport to serve, and for the scientific community, this means welcoming files in LaTex and other formats if their clients prefer to use other formats.
(In this respect, note that the more elderly members of the science community used to have a secretary, so some still struggle with basic typing and Word. I am old enough to recall the excitement when a colleague of mine purchased his first Mac. When I wrote my PhD thesis some three years later, typing one's own thesis on a desktop computer had become the norm. We must allow for improvements to be incorporated as they appear, so I do not believe that restricting people to LaTex would be beneficial.)
In respect of your question about the journals using different formats, you might be interested to learn of a service called Typeset [http://typeset.io/]. The Typeset service recognises the multitude of formats scientists are required to use and transforms papers into the format required by the various publishing houses. I am not aware of any similar services, but they might exist. My personal experience of using Typeset has been mixed – the concept is brilliant (as many researchers must waste valuable days and weeks converting papers from one format to another as they attempt to find a publishing house that will accept their work), the general responsiveness of the staff and willingness to help is commendable (although I have experienced the same issues uploading figures recently that I reported one year ago, and fresh ones besides). It is only fair to note that the papers I am producing are atypical, they are enormous compared to a conventional short research paper and extremely figure rich. (If you wish to know how well the service works for a short manuscript, you could pose the question as my papers really only represent a test for the limits of the service!)
There is a message for the industry here: Any proactive publishing house seeking to provide a genuine service to the scientific community could accept the pdf of a paper in any (clearly legible) format for review. Upon acceptance of a paper, they could then send those papers, and only those papers, to a service such as Typeset for conversion to their preferred format. This would enable researchers to concentrate on their research and save time and money for the research community. It would also enable authors to prepare their papers with or without LaTex.
As far as obliging students to use LaTex is concerned, I would suggest that undergraduates intending to work in industry might be wasting their time learning to use it – an undergraduate degree is over in a flash, and surely there are better ways to spend time during these valuable years. I believe that research students in mathematics and theoretical physic would be stuck if they chose not to learn LaTex, though.
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