Hi,
As I discussed in my earlier post, I recommended that the OP should learn to use whatever tools are required for the journal publications in his/her field: those might be Word, those might be TeX.
Next I'd like to address the comments that there are markups "all over the place" in LaTeX. In my experience, the only place in LaTeX documents that there are markups "all over the place" is when writing mathematics. For writing paragraphs without mathematics, LaTeX looks just like plain text. And, in my experience, the markups for math are no harder than manually writing the math symbols in the first place, such as writing \int_0^\infty for the integral from 0 to infinity. The nice thing about TeX is that this simple markup will correctly place the math symbols in the output whether the integral is "inline" in a text paragraph or whether it is in a separate equation line (the placement is different, by the way). Correct me if I am wrong, but I suspect that for Word you would have to specify two different integrals, one for the inline text and one for the equation line. Is this not true? So, when writing mathematics in TeX, the author does not need to be concerned with the formatting of the output, he or she can rather concentrate on the content, with TeX taking care of the proper formatting for you.
A comment was also raised about margins, implying that LaTeX had no way of setting margins easily; well, in LaTeX, you just change a single number and you change the margin spacing for the entire document. Isn't this also true in Word, don't you just change the margins for the entire document in a single spot? In LaTeX, if you change the page margins by changing that single number, then any "offsets" will also change appropriately, say those offset equations or highlighted boxes or figure wraparound paragraphs will all be automatically adjusted for you after a single margin change.
Let me ask about Word's equations? Benwiggy in his post states that "equations can be pasted directly in [ed. to Pages] from Apple's Grapher application". But do you know how hard it is to have to constantly have to paste equations into a document in the proper places? If you edit the equations, then you have to generate new images are repaste them? If you edit the text then you may also have to reedit and repaste some of the equations because now the old ones don't quite fit correctly. Pasting separate images for each equation in a physics or mathematics article is extremely time-consuming in my experience. How does Word handle equations?
Benwiggy also states that Pages handles the pasting of images, such as EPS and PDF, quite well and implies that it does so better than Word --- well, TeX was designed from the very outset (before LaTeX and PDF) to use Postscript and so it handles EPS and PDF with aplomb. Changing the size of an image requires changing a single number -- why you can even scale all of the images in a LaTeX document by changing one number: you don't have to individually scale each image.
I think there are important reasons why arXiv.org (physics), the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society, and the American Mathematical Society request that all submissions be in LaTeX. Many individual journals also request LaTeX.
Now I have stated my opinions and backed them up with examples and explanations.
Personally, I don't like being called a "fanboy" without cause nor do I like having someone state "there's no way in Hell I would use something like LaTex" without backing up those statements with a reasoned argument. Maybe in your field you don't need LaTeX, and that is a perfectly good reason not to ever use it. But I don't think that you should then state or imply that LaTeX is worthless, especially when for some tasks there is no replacement for it. And many, many journals request submissions in LaTeX. If you don't believe me, go to the APS's or AMS's web sites and check their instructions for authors.
Respectfully,
Switon
That may be desirable in some quarters, of course.
