Although LaTeX typesets beautiful documents, using it is frankly a pain as it takes far longer to typeset a document in LaTeX than in Word or OOo Writer. You arguably have more flexibility in LaTeX, but its nature to typeset using its own sort of syntax makes documents take significantly longer to write.<p>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.)
There is no doubt that LaTeX produces way more beautiful documents than Microsoft Word, even if Word defaults settings are changed.<p>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...<p>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.<p>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.
I am surprised no one mentioned TeXmacs ( <a href="http://www.texmacs.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.texmacs.org/</a> ) yet. It is a WYSIWYG editor that can both import from (works reasonably well) and export (works perfecly) to TeX.<p>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.<p>Some folks here might also like the fact that it is entirely written in Scheme.
For writing school assignments, I looked for a system that would meet two requirements:<p>1. The text can be edited using vim, or at least vi-like keybindings.<p>2. The storage format is plain text, so any version-control system can efficiently store, diff and merge it.<p>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.<p>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.
Dragging tabs and margins around in Word seem like black magic to me. I never have any good intuition about how things will reflow. Or a good sense of what makes for a good layout in the first place, frankly.<p>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.<p>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).
Two responses:<p>(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.<p>(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.
Here's what I use:<p>- LaTeX if the document will have a bunch of equations.<p>- Word for everything else.<p>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.
Am I the only one who thinks ligatures and small caps are practically worthless?<p>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).<p>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.
I've been using LaTeX for years to write academic papers. Only recently have some conferences started moving to Word. This has made simultaneous editing a pain.<p>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.
I don't use LaTeX directly but I have used Scrivener's LaTeX/XSLT output template scheme and MacTeX with mixed success for some technical documentation.<p>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.<p>Scrivener - <a href="http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html</a><p>MacTeX - <a href="http://www.tug.org/mactex/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tug.org/mactex/</a>
My preference is a bit biased since most of the documents I type up are mathematical in nature, but LaTeX wins hands down.<p>Yes, the learning curve is much steeper than Word for LaTeX, but doesn't everything worth knowing involve an initial period of head smacking?
Note that there are quite a few more examples of what LaTeX does well here:
<a href="http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex" rel="nofollow">http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex</a><p>Also included is the tex source used.