The problem with systems like Adobe Indesign is that they are “What You See Is All You Get”. For a company brochure with special typography and particular Panto

The problem with systems like Adobe Indesign is that they are “What You See Is All You Get”. For a company brochure with special typography and particular Pantone ink colors used in offset printing there may be nothing better. However, I’ve owned a license to Indesign for over a decade. I’ve done tutorials, bought half a dozen books on it and maybe produced one document using it. In Indesign I wasted so much time figuring out how to get the layout, the formatting, the figures, code samples, mathematics, bibliography, even page numbering, index and footers I wanted that I had to give up. The power of bibtex, TikZ, and other packages in the TeX ecosystem make it possible to use a system that produces just the sort of documents that I want—and the software is infinitely less expensive (it doesn’t cost anything). TeX isn’t without its difficulties. I’ve been programming for over 50 years and still dread diving into the macro language based code for complex packages—but at least it’s available, something you can’t say about these other proprietary systems. TeX was written by a Computer Scientist (perhaps the most eminent Computer Scientist) and it shows. Its real power is revealed only to those able to program. This is a shame, because using it has made me appreciate good typesetting—something I’ve found difficult to achieve in the kind of papers I write when I use other tools. I use MS Word when my recipient needs it that way, I use Apple Pages or Google Docs for simple documents when I don’t care what they look like, and Markdown or Org mode for my own notes. For anything important or for something I want to have as archival source (TeX is a purposely frozen format) I use TeX and its related tools, LaTeX etc. Give it some time, it may grow on you.