One significant disadvantage of using LaTeX, especially as a non-native speaker, is lack of grammar checker as in MS Word. Although it was really painful to do grammar check, now it becomes much easier than before, especially thanks to OpenOffice.
Previously, to check grammar, I converted LaTeX document in to a HTML file (by latex2html or latex4ht) and opened it with MS Word.
An annoying part of this procedure is that mathematical equations and variables are not recognized as equation objects. As a result, MS Word thinks that there many grammatical errors and typos. For example, a variable 
Since OpenOffice employs MathML, a converted document in an OpenOffice format is much more comparable to the original LaTeX document. Even though OpenOffice version 3 or higher is capable of grammar checking, we can use OpenOffice to export the converted document as a .doc file or a .rtf file, so that we can open it with MS Word.
Procedures:
- Install TeX4ht if not available
- Convert your .tex file by
mk4ht oolatex your_filename.tex - A .odt file and a bunch of other files will be generated
- Open the .odt file by OpenOffice and perform grammar check
I was pretty much astonished by the quality of the conversion and how smooth I can check my grammar.
