The big thing for me is macros and programmability. Early on in my learning graphic design I found the interactive tools of the time (Aldus PageMaker, Quark XP

The big thing for me is macros and programmability. Early on in my learning graphic design I found the interactive tools of the time (Aldus PageMaker, Quark XPress) quite primitive and limiting --- at one point in order to have the control I wanted I was using Altsys Virtuoso (basically Macromedia Freehand v4, a drawing program) to lay out books --- at least it would hang punctuation. Finding TeX on my NeXT Cube and then learning it meant that I had access to a tool which rather than being limited by what features a corporation decided to implement for a given version, was only limited by computer processing power, storage space, and my facility to write macros. A good example of this is: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/31088/any-automated-system-to-compute-the-linear-length-of-a-letters-in-a-word-or-ph/31094#31094 https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/31088/any-... In addition to a lot of books and so forth, I've used TeX to: - write the typesetting back-end for "HS" ads for an interactive phone book production system - measure all the ads for a country's phone book, check the dimensions against their nominal size, and then either correct them (so that they would fit correctly) or note that ad in a list (so that the ad could be re-designed at the correct size) - implement the typesetting back-end for a customizable story book where the text was selected by the user and their choices would be implemented so as to set the desired appearance of images More importantly, for general development, when making TeX, Dr. Donald E. Knuth created Literate Programming: http://literateprogramming.com/ http://literateprogramming.com/ which programming style has allowed me to make larger and more complex programs more easily.