I've recently looked into LaTeX after several years of other types of document management/publishing. I was pleased to find that development on LaTeX has continued, making it somewhat more user friendly. I'd say it's now as easy, for complex documents, as your friendly neighborhood word processor.
* It now has a pdf rendering engine, with support for standard graphics formats, so it's no longer necessary to convert images to eps, and pdf generation is a one step process. * There are more easy options for page layout, headers, footers, etc. * My company requires long tables in some documentation. These tables can go on for page after page, a real headache in word processors. LaTeX now handles these nicely. * You can easily modularize documents. This feature has always been there, but it was my exposure to xml documentation that introduced me to the concept. It makes it very easy, for example, to move huge tables around, and to add, delete, or reuse them. Some of the old issues are there, for example it's still difficult to convert documents from word processor formats. Microsoft's strange ideas about certain unicode characters are still a hassle (although LaTeX now has good support for standard unicode.) Also, lots of people love the MS revision control system, as it's simple and doesn't require a RC server. So it's still the case that it's difficult to collaborate with users who love their word processors and who know nothing of text based RC. For me this means that I only use LaTeX (or xml) when I'm flying solo. Tom Ed -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
