LaTex is a macro package which runs on top of the TEX typesetting system, the latter being invented by Donald Knuth in the early 1980s.
LaTex is an appropriate choice if you want one of the pre-designed document types which LaTex provides (think Word templates). However for a book which will require custom layout and formatting (and it will), LaTex is not necessarily the most sensible choice. Often it is better to just use plain TEX and design your own macros as you need them for the elements of your particular publication. One important point to make is that both TEX and LaTex date from the 1980s, which was pre-Unicode. Handling anything other than 7-bit ASCII in these systems requires special "escape sequences" which is messy. There is now a version of TEX which supports Unicode. This is called Xetex. On the Macintosh, Xetex integrates directly with the OSX font system, so you can utilise any installed font easily. I believe there is also a companion Unicode-aware LaTex called XeLatex. I haven't used that. I can speak from personal experience, having produced numerous books using both TEX and more recently Xetex. I've also set up automatic server-based document generation systems using Xetex and having Unicode support makes a BIG difference to the simplicity of the authoring process. These systems go from Unicode TEX markup to PDF in one step. You might be interested to know that the "Pragmatic Programmers" use TEX for many (all?) of their books and they have an online book regeneration system whereby registered purchasers of a book (e.g. their Ruby on Rails book) can download a freshly generated PDF of the very latest version of the book on demand. Try doing that with Word! Markup-based publishing systems, like TEX, offer a flexibility which WYSIWYG systems like Word cannot. You author at an abstract level of document structure and the TEX software interprets your embedded directives (which you can define however you want) to produce the final document. It's somewhat similar to the idea of compiling source code into an executable program. Paul Howson Queensland, Australia.
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