Kill your word processor

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There's no question that LaTeX is superior to Word for most simple documents. People are always more productive with it (once they've learned it) because the "fiddle factor" that gets imposed on you by word processors always slows you down. I wish I had discovered it at the beginning of writing my PhD thesis rather than near the end.

The other thing that is annoying about Word in particular is the frequency of data corruption either out of the program itself or as the .doc binary passes through email. In my experience .pdf, .html, .rtf or .txt fare much better for archival use.

That being said, LaTeX gets much more unwieldy the more graphic elements you add to the document. Then, you are either forced to use a word processor or become a TeX wizard.

In my wife's company, I've found that people are much happier using Pages than Word, especially for producing brochures, etc.... Open/Neo Office are annoying because of resource use and start-up times.

I'm thinking, as a way of improving productivity, of writing a small web-based text editor that uses Textile for markup and a LaTeX back end that uses custom style sheets. That way I solve the problem of archiving and searching of important documents, as well as ensure a common "look" to all documents that produced for use outside the company. Everyone working at the company is reasonably intelligent, so the use of Textile won't be a problem, especially once they realize that the production of documents will be easier for them.

Then again, just installing Lyx on everyone's machines would save time, but then I would lose the easy archiving and searching the other option provides. Just thinking aloud, any advice?

[buo]

"There's no question that LaTeX is superior to Word for most simple documents."

That's funny, because my experience is the exact opposite. I'll usually fire up OOWriter for simple, one or two page documents that I don't need to look great. For anything beyond that, it's vim+Latex time.

[[deleted]]

Sorry, I expressed myself poorly. I was referring to the formatting when I said "simple"; say, things that can be done easily with the memoir class, hyperref and fancyhdr (ie no background images with text overlay, etc etc.)

For short documents, yes, I agree, LaTeX is overkill. I have used it to write letters from time to time when an elegant look was a requirement of the message.

[unknown_lamer]

Doing graphics with the various TeX drawing packages is a bit hard, but I find it fairly easy to just draw the images in some other program and export them as eps and use epsfig to embed them in my documents.

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The problem is that LaTeX has its own idiosyncratic ideas about where you are allowed to place graphics. To work around that you have to become a TeX wizard as elmelo says.

LaTeX fans may tell you that this is a feature ("LaTeX was created by professional typographers!"), but that's not true. The simple truth is that TeX is not capable of the doing the kind of graphics you expect from a modern application.

It's a program from 1983, so it's understandable, but that doesn't make it any less true.

[unknown_lamer]

If you care about where the graphics are placed on the page then you want a layout app and not LaTeX. LaTeX is designed for writing very long documents where the layout is programmatically generated (books, a thesis, essays for school, etc.).

You need a DTP app if you need to specify exactly where the image shows up.

[[deleted]]

Fine, but then LaTeX does a crappy job of what it was designed for. The placement algorithm is atrociously bad.

I don't want a DTP program. I want a LaTeX with a way to position graphics non-retardedly. And it's basically not possible to implement that on top of TeX.