I want to write in LaTeX, but my co-authors do not

As a working scientist, I can answer: no, please do not focus on tricky solutions.

First of all, you are going to write a paper, and I guess you will send it to a journal for possible publication. So you should not start a religion war to use a piece of software that will be totally irrelevant for the final purpose. Unless, of course, the journal needs a specific file type for submission.

Second, it is mostly a matter of taste if you prefer TeX or Microsoft Word (or any other visual word processor). Both communities can spend plenty of words to convince the world that they are the best, but in my experience no scientist really needs the power of one system instead of the power of the other. Paradoxically, you could just write the paper by hand, and save time for more important discussions.

To summarize: vote and accept the majority. It will not be a big problem, if you have to write your paper with Word.

The main Question is, Are you using any of the advanced features of LaTeX?

If you are, Let them work in whatever editor they like. But tell your co-authors you expect plain TXT (text) files. That way the editor does not matter and its only a matter of merging in there text into the LaTeX source files.

If you are not. There is no real advantage of using Technology 'Y'. Just use whatever the group is comfortable in using.

Pro tip: Word Processors like Microsoft Word have a tendency to make you spend a lot of time in markup. While most of the time this is not important to the story being told (or paper being written)

I would advise to take a step back and focus on the product (the paper) and do the markup and lay outing after the text is written. this aves a lot of time an is technology agnostic.

For this purpose I would use (as in myself) a Markdown Editor like Atom, and a Git repository for concurrent Versioning. I must add that I am both familiar with git and markdown as an Software Developer.

Good luck with your papers.

--Additional: When you want to work together and edit the same files anywhere and not want 'merge-hell' use the tools Software developers have created. Tools like Git, Hg (Mercury), bzr (Bazaar) are all suitable for merging in edits from many developers into the same files.

I've been doing this lately, and my solution has been to do the work in LaTeX but compile in multiple formats including .docx.

This allows collaborators to use the format they feel comfortable in, but still lets me use my preferred system for writing. The downside is that it requires you to manually port their changes from the format they were working on into the tex document. When the changes are moderate, this is not too bad, but it can get to be a lot if they are making large changes.

This has been driven by the fact that my collaborators are non-technical, but the documents themselves have a lot of technical features. I am unwilling to give up the power of my system (RMarkdown, LaTeX, and Git). However, there is also no way that these collaborators will (or should) invest the time to learn Git or LaTeX.