And I don't think Times New Roman is a particularly bad font. Although it is overused everywhere and may cause eyesores due to this fact, the font itself is serious and a standard in many areas and thus is my second favourite font (after Helvetica.)
But when graphics enter, I'm easily stuck loosing a lot of time. For now, i tend to use tikz and will learn Inkscape, after bad experiences with dia, metapost, etc. Sure under MacOS Omnigraffle produces great output...
Good documents are not only text...
In Word, you'll spend your time coercing word to do what you want.
The difference: you learn, Word doesn't.
Oh, and Word doesn't do emacs keybindings, which is ridiculous. LaTeX you can just edit in emacs, which is wonderful.
Also, it is much easier to combine content from many different TeX files than from Word/OO files, which makes it much easier to do things like compile lecture notes for a class or discussions notes for a project.
I view learning TeX as something like learning how to use vi or emacs. It's difficult, often painful, and hard to see the benefits in the beginning compared to †he big office suites you're used to, but once you get past the initial learning curve, you become remarkably more productive.
More importantly, the default Microsoft versions of Times New Roman have shitty kerning, are set not to use ligatures by default, use capitalized (“lining”) numbers, and so forth. If you redid all of the kerning tables by hand, and used a better typographic engine than MS Word, you could get Times New Roman to look passable; it’s never going to be beautiful though.
And, for the record: it's better than original Times in a lot of ways. I don't think it handles numbers or the @ sign as well, but the actual characters are much more balanced.
I have noticed that Apple's Pages, while idiosyncratic in its own bizarre ways, does fulfill a number of the author's complaints regarding other word processors, particularly when it comes to ligatures and old-style figures (the numerals with ascenders and descenders).
(Disclaimer: I have no experience with LaTeX, and I'm not yet in college so I can't take notes using a laptop... I'm just being curious here.)
In fact, I think they both hurt readability. The few cases where ligatures help, such as "f)" or "To", are better served by kerning pairs (which both Word and Writer supports).
Word and Writer have spent their development effort on things that users care about: being reasonably easy to use. And almost all of the font research of recent years has gone into screen and print readability, not style.
By using it you can always do things nearly as quickly as you would using MS Word, and then fine tune things later if you know LaTeX. Every time I want to do something I think it is painful using LaTeX (like complex nested tables) that's the route I take - it works really great for me.
Some folks here might also like the fact that it is entirely written in Scheme.
I thought the same thing ("I can't believe I didn't know about this application before!") when I first heard of it 8 months ago...
The thing is people need a word processor that comes out of the box with professional fonts, nice alignment parameters. They sure don't want a piece of software that begs them to download fuzzy fonts and paste text from a web page without reformatting all of this...
People don't want to learn a language for writing text either. They don't want to spend hours to find this package that would looks so great drawing a horizontal line under the header.
Apple Pages is a good alternative, it's my choice for creating professional documents (and believe me, I'm a real typomaniac) without losing time with LaTeX.
(1) Lyx is a cross-platform graphical editor that spits out LaTeX, has reasonable UI for many of the interesting things you'd do in a TeX document, and has a pretty good set of preferences and controls. I used to swear by it.
(2) LaTeX is very painful to edit in, no matter what people tell you. Yes, Word does a crappy job of typesetting. But LaTeX is very 1985. You can get similar results in a visual editor with a page layout program; this is why so many people used to rave about Framemaker over Word. On the Mac, iWork's Pages.app will do a passable job; far better than Word. I've ported Quark templates to it without a problem.
If I might ask, what do you use now?
For what it's worth, I edit text in a text editor (Emacs), then use Markdown to get it into something that's easy to paste into Pages.app. I've done long-form editing in Pages.app, and I don't love it, but it's far less painful than LaTeX.
- LaTeX if the document will have a bunch of equations.
- Word for everything else.
For me, it's a question of efficiency. I find that I can typeset equations much faster with LaTeX than with Word, and I find that I can typeset general text much faster with Word than with LaTeX. The other issue is with shared documents: if I need to share an editable version of a document with somebody, there's a far better chance that they will be able to use a Word file than a LaTeX file.
I started using it a few years ago and haven't looked back.
Yes, the learning curve is much steeper than Word for LaTeX, but doesn't everything worth knowing involve an initial period of head smacking?
If everything you know was learned at some point, did you have an initial period of head smacking for everything you know?
I've recently started exploring what it would mean to use the experimental CSS multi-column support in Webkit and Gecko to recreate the CHI template. I've had some good luck. Although, it would make life a lot easier if they supported column-span.
1. The text can be edited using vim, or at least vi-like keybindings.
2. The storage format is plain text, so any version-control system can efficiently store, diff and merge it.
OpenOffice can work on top of a single XML file, but XML diffing is not like diffing lines of code, and every accidental ^W is still interpreted as "close document". HTML kind of works, but lacks too many typesetting and document-creation features and fixing it with CSS becomes tedious. I played with Texmacs and Lyx for a little while, but eventually bit the bullet and learned LaTeX and vim-latex.
Verdict: If you were willing to invest your time in emacs or vim, learning LaTeX feel similar but easier; spending a little extra time to learn a helper package like vim-latex or AUCTeX really makes it worthwhile.
The genius of LaTeX is you can crib someone else's style, and your output will look like it was created by a typesetting genius. Personally, I don't think I could ever fiddle around with Word long enough to get output that looks as good.
Another big win with LaTeX is it lets you use an editor that's not awful. Editing your actual text in Word is pretty painful if you're used to Emacs (or other program actually designed for editing text productively).
I say "mixed success" because getting the overall document structure setup the way I wanted very error-prone. Some simple things like generating a table of contents required me to drop down into low level details. I eventually got it to do what I needed to do but for the amount of documentation I ended up writing I'm not sure it was worth the effort.
Scrivener - http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html
MacTeX - http://www.tug.org/mactex/
Also included is the tex source used.
