As for the “focusing on content” thing… provided style files exist, you don’t see format so much as structure in the document. True, you may not like seeing the command section, however, it has much more useful meaning to it than bold, slightly larger, and preceded by a number.

A quality editor precludes many syntax errors by providing keystrokes that match braces, etc. Further, for the faint of heart, a “GUI interface to LaTeX” is available through LyX, which provides a more visual experience while retaining the power LaTeX provides.

I recently downloaded your MacTex. While trying to typeset in TexShop, the program said that I was missing teTex or that I had the wrong path. As I would like to download MacTex – 2007, how do I uninstall the version from your page?

Thank you. I think you’re doing a great job.

Best

Novice

I also think that this was a fairly well written summary of the pros and cons of LaTeX. I do have one more suggestion for a very helpful LaTeX related tool. For those who use bibtex to handle their bibliographies, you should check out jabref. It is a bibtex organizer written in java. It has a very intuitive UI, and can import and export all sorts of bibliographic formats like Endnote, RIS, ISI etc. very easily.

The Beauty of LaTeX

And why do all these journals have their own typesetting preferences? It would indeed be easier if academics could focus on the content – and let LaTeX take care of the form. But more often than not, I spend days tweaking LaTeX or making Stylesheets to fit the requests of a publisher who thinks that his stylesheet is the best. If they would show a more professional attitude, they could provide free .sty files to make LaTeX work effortlessly with their own stylesheet requirements. But more often than not, they don’t provide any templates.

So far, I have collected stylesheet with 8 different way to do headings and subheadings. That’s really truly unprofessional. We have a tool that allows excellent type-setting, but it seems that publishers are not too keen to make us use it.

You have a really good point here – but your argument is sligthly sollipsistic. I mean to say that the fact that M$ Word is the de facto business standard document format is the reason why most people would resort to it for data exchange. Otherwise, people would use a more stable data format. Such is life :-). But your point is good: what’s my editor going to do with my lovely, hyper-linked, indexed and printer-ready pdf manuscript?

Of course, Real Men ™ would use cvs, or some other versioning system. For a programmer, nothing is easier than checking in a TeX source file into cvs. But writers need to write, not go for an IT degree, so this makes the accessibility of the system very hard indeed. (LyX 4.x incorporates change tracking, and it’s very nice, but that ties you to the .lyx document format, which is hardly an improvement).

I expect the current trend in web-based applications to eventually incorporate concurrent version tracking. You only need to put two and two together to realise that solutions like Writely (http://www.writely.com) can really benefit from such an arrangement. So here’s looking to the future.

Btw, there is a rather less known web-based office suite called gOffice (https://goffice.com) which is based on a TeX engine (the rather recent XeTeX variety, if I am not mistaken). Unfortunately, it has recently ceased to be free, for reasons which are beyond my comprehension, so I’m not even sure one can test-drive it for a while to see how it handles.