“LaTeX is a free typesetting application with superb output, but
it’s not for the timid.”
“Without a major Linux kernel release, user-friendliness and
word processing made some of the best news in the open source world
last year.”
“The free software communities focused much attention on
StarOffice, WordPerfect, AbiWord, KWord, and the like. Meanwhile,
most have ignored one of the best-kept secrets in the world of
document creation. Though it ships with almost every Linux
distribution, and has been around longer than Linux itself, the
LaTeX typesetting system remains a hidden gem.”
“Quite likely the most powerful document creation and management
system available, LaTeX (and its underlying typesetting engine,
TeX) is favored in academia and is the required format for many
scholarly papers. It takes typesetting issues such as line-breaks
and inter-character spacing very seriously, and it arguably has no
peer in the task of formatting complex math equations. It’s been
ported to just about every major platform and a bunch of minor
ones.”
“So why isn’t LaTeX right up there with all the other word
processors? Well, if you think that Linux has a problem with
user-friendliness, wait until you try LaTeX. Calling LaTeX
“esoteric” is a bit of understatement.”