>There's no reason I should have to go on the internet to find out how to use columns. Or sub figures. Or appendices. It should just work. >I'm not a less-geeky

>There's no reason I should have to go on the internet to find out how to use columns. Or sub figures. Or appendices. It should just work. >I'm not a less-geeky user who needs to be coddled (unless by "less geeky" you mean 99.99% of users). I just want to write up my research, and I don't want to have to think about typesetting theory. I agree that those things should be easy to find. What I meant is that for the current user base those are nice to have but not essential. I have long since accumulated enough examples of the type of documents I write that I can quickly do the basic things just by copying them from somewhere else. I assume that people that write scientific articles already have working examples of two columns, sub figures and appendices that they just copy when they do a new article. If you wanted to make LaTeX much more widely use then you'd need all the goodies you mentioned. But to even make those possible the environment under them needs to be much more consistent and robust than it is now. Something like LyX could work well if manual intervention in the typesetting wasn't so needed.