> Except that's exactly one of the most common reasons I see given to people who are not programmers to use LaTeX. There's a subtle point here: LaTeX helps wit

> Except that's exactly one of the most common reasons I see given to people who are not programmers to use LaTeX. There's a subtle point here: LaTeX helps with application not decision. When a LaTeX advocate says, "You don't have to fiddle with formatting." they are saying you don't have to apply the formatting to your document, its automatic. But the author misunderstands this as "you don't have to decide on the formatting for your document". So he responds: follow the defaults or a style guide. But that's not where LaTeX helps. LaTeX is about automatically applying a style to a document NOT deciding on what that style should be. > I don't really buy these because you can say the same thing about Word. Sure. LaTeX advocates are probably somewhat behind what the savvy word user is doing. There is less of gap in the approaches than might be assumed.