Hey! I must confess I haven't actually read those myself, although I did recently buy Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitive Information", on which the Tufte

Hey! I must confess I haven't actually read those myself, although I did recently buy Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitive Information", on which the Tufte class is based I believe. If you eventually get into typography in general, I can't recommend "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst enough. It's rightly called the typographer's bible. The typesetting service sprang from the modest success of LaTeX Templates. The large number of visitors meant that I had a constant stream of questions from individuals and businesses asking about modifying templates to include/change this or that. I did the whole free support thing for 1 or 2 years, but eventually realized it's a never-ending thankless task and I may as well try to capitalize on this desire that people have. Like with Creodocs, I had no idea whether anyone would pay me for this. The number of existing services was very small. I made the site and linked to it from LaTeX Templates, which is the perfect place to advertise, and eventually I started to get a trickle of clients. My rate initially was something like $30USD/hour, which was an insanely large amount for a poor PhD student, and I even remember a client saying I was way undercharging for the quality of work! As I've had more and more clients, I've built up the Showcase page to show off what the service is capable of, and I believe this is an important draw to give legitimacy to the service and show what LaTeX itself is capable of. I haven't asked, but I imagine most of my clients come from LaTeX Templates so the key for me has been to provide something for free and then upsell to a paid service. Nothing new there :)