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From experience, Microsoft Office (Word plus PowerPoint for diagrams) is capable of doing approximately all of what you see there. I'm not sure what the curren

From experience, Microsoft Office (Word plus PowerPoint for diagrams) is capable of doing approximately all of what you see there. I'm not sure what the current state of LibreOffice is when it comes to advanced typesetting, but I expect it could easily do everything in that report. LaTeX is in a class of it's own, practically the space shuttle compared to a Cessna. Unfortunately, the learning curve is a seemingly endless source of ¡fun! for beginners.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago
Can latex produce this level - I have only ever got to the basic level and realised that getting something at the "simple MS Office" level is a vast climb. Any templates that are beyond "maths paper in arxiv" level I should look again at?
- carmen_sandiego 6y ago
  It can but I'm not sure the effort is really worth it. I went through a period of my life where I was using LaTeX for literally every document I produced. Presentations, all kinds of charts and cheatsheets with diagrams and illustrations through TikZ. They looked beautiful in the end but nobody who consumes them appreciates the massive effort. People assume you are just slightly better at Word rather than really good at LaTeX. Not that the only point of learning things is to impress others, but it's pretty demoralizing. At the time I thought 'just learn one tool well and use it forever', but now I feel more like 'just use the best tool for the job'. In this case I would say that's InDesign and a few hours of tutorials, mostly. The illustrations you can choose another tool if appropriate.
  - neolog 6y ago
    I learned a lot about certain tools that got outmoded within a few years. I would like to have a way to think about when "learn this one tool and use it forever" is appropriate. Maybe investment in certain kinds of tools pays off more.
- d110af5ccf 6y ago
  > Can latex produce this level Yes. I was quite serious about the space shuttle analogy. https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/158668 https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/158668 It can be quite a bit of work configuring custom templates though and any one off deviations are likely to require significant effort as well. There are specific use cases (for example publications with lots of mathematical notation, or the periodic regeneration of tables and charts by a small script) where it can be quite useful. Most people would probably be better served by a standard office software suite though. Even something as simple as Google Docs is sufficient for the vast majority of documents. (Seriously though, TeX & Co can do just about anything. https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/159445 https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/159445 https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/95783 https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/95783)
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Don't use bare LaTeX. Use Lyx or another frontend for it. Much more like Office, though it works a bit different - Lyx is not WYSIWYG, it's more "what you ask for is what you get", which takes a little bit of getting used to. Still, it's the space shuttle without all those years of astronaut training.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  LaTeX frontends tend to be slow, because LaTeX is not designed for realtime recompilation or layout. I prefer editors with quick but not realtime updating, where I can write the code and see the document change.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    I don't recall Lyx as being slow (even on what is now a slow machine), but I wasn't using it on a very big project.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

Can latex produce this level - I have only ever got to the basic level and realised that getting something at the "simple MS Office" level is a vast climb. Any templates that are beyond "maths paper in arxiv" level I should look again at?

carmen_sandiego 6y ago
It can but I'm not sure the effort is really worth it. I went through a period of my life where I was using LaTeX for literally every document I produced. Presentations, all kinds of charts and cheatsheets with diagrams and illustrations through TikZ. They looked beautiful in the end but nobody who consumes them appreciates the massive effort. People assume you are just slightly better at Word rather than really good at LaTeX. Not that the only point of learning things is to impress others, but it's pretty demoralizing. At the time I thought 'just learn one tool well and use it forever', but now I feel more like 'just use the best tool for the job'. In this case I would say that's InDesign and a few hours of tutorials, mostly. The illustrations you can choose another tool if appropriate.
- neolog 6y ago
  I learned a lot about certain tools that got outmoded within a few years. I would like to have a way to think about when "learn this one tool and use it forever" is appropriate. Maybe investment in certain kinds of tools pays off more.
d110af5ccf 6y ago
> Can latex produce this level Yes. I was quite serious about the space shuttle analogy. https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/158668 https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/158668 It can be quite a bit of work configuring custom templates though and any one off deviations are likely to require significant effort as well. There are specific use cases (for example publications with lots of mathematical notation, or the periodic regeneration of tables and charts by a small script) where it can be quite useful. Most people would probably be better served by a standard office software suite though. Even something as simple as Google Docs is sufficient for the vast majority of documents. (Seriously though, TeX & Co can do just about anything. https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/159445 https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/159445 https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/95783 https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/95783)

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

Don't use bare LaTeX. Use Lyx or another frontend for it. Much more like Office, though it works a bit different - Lyx is not WYSIWYG, it's more "what you ask for is what you get", which takes a little bit of getting used to. Still, it's the space shuttle without all those years of astronaut training.

whatshisface 6y ago
LaTeX frontends tend to be slow, because LaTeX is not designed for realtime recompilation or layout. I prefer editors with quick but not realtime updating, where I can write the code and see the document change.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  I don't recall Lyx as being slow (even on what is now a slow machine), but I wasn't using it on a very big project.