There are a couple of alternatives that I find quite useful. For very small documents (a couple of pages at most), writing in Markdown and running it through P

There are a couple of alternatives that I find quite useful. For very small documents (a couple of pages at most), writing in Markdown and running it through Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) gives good results for very little effort. For most things, I use Org-Mode for Emacs (http://orgmode.org/ http://orgmode.org/), which is an absolute joy to use. It outputs via Latex, and if you want a bit of extra customization you can include Latex statements verbatim. Org-Mode also works as a literate programming environment if you want to include and run bits of code, include parts of other files, or if you want to generate charts or diagrams. Edit: I should also mention that org-mode has a great table editor.