“Life is not fair, is it? You learned how to use Microsoft
Word or Corel WordPerfect, only to find yourself at a job where
your boss says you must use LaTeX. What is this thing? Can it
be used for anything practical, like writing letters, memos,
reports, sending faxes or printing price lists? These are some of
the first questions that come to mind when you start using it.
Fortunately, with LaTeX, it is just as easy to typeset a 1,000-page
book filled with mathematical formulae as it is to prepare a short
letter or a price list. These kinds of real-world office
applications are what we are going to discuss…”
“Probably the most common misconception about LaTeX is thinking
of it as some kind of text editor or word processor. It is neither
of those tools.”
“Although LaTeX is only a pure typesetting system (it is not a
visual DTP package like Microsoft Publisher, Adobe PageMaker or
QuarkXPress) and the documents you process must be created using a
plaintext editor, the quality of the documents generated in LaTeX
are often much superior to Word’s own efforts.”