I have the exact opposite experience with LaTeX. Looking at a few example documents and trying them out will get nearly anyone started on writing LaTeX documents. For very sophisticated effects (tables, complicated graphics that interacts with the text in a nontrivial way, etc) the time investment is much more substantial but those same effects are just as difficult (if not impossible) to achieve with Word or other WYSIWYG editors. Automatic referencing, bibliography maintenance are quite unique to LaTeX and are easy to use. Tables may be hard but some specialized tools (like Lyx) might help.
Word documents can be edited by people who have access to an appropriate version of Word (I do not, admittedly by choice) but the documents themselves are binary (ok, xml) mess, whereas LaTeX ones are greppable, searcheable, etc. They also 'age' much better. I can still LaTeX most documents from 20 years ago (sometimes with minor changes).
As a disclaimer, I am one of those people who uses (La)TeX for everything. I know TeX intimately to the point that I messed with the source code several times and wrote tens of thousands of TeX macros (this is not an exaggeration). I may be biased but I still feel that learning LaTeX is well worth the modest effort it takes to start writing LaTeX documents. And the typesetting TeX is capable of is still unsurpassed.
> Word documents can be edited by people who have access to an appropriate version of Word ... LaTeX ones are greppable, searcheable, etc. They also 'age' much better. I can still LaTeX most documents from 20 years ago
I really value the fact that LaTeX is free software, but as a matter of practical reality, are old LaTeX documents really more accessible than Word documents? There is plenty of free software with (imperfect) support for Word these days. I recently opened a bunch of Word documents that were more than 20 years old, and I'm sure I didn't get a pixel-perfect reproduction of the original document, but as someone without a strong grasp of the LaTeX package ecosystem, I imagine compiling old LaTeX documents would have been more difficult than just installing LibreOffice or uploading the document to Google Docs.
Agreed. The first time I used LaTeX to write a few documents I spent less time learning it than formatting the 90-page Word document that eventually made me decide to check out LaTeX in the first place.
I never regretted it, nowadays I avoid Word when possible and go for org-mode documents mixed with LaTeX. That gives me all the features and control but with less typing.
As a fellow frequent tex user, I'm curious at the macros you've written. I've found that I've written very few. I believe it is literally one for multi line commenting, breaking up slides in beamer (like 2x2, 3x2, whatever), and dumb things like section titles for homeworks. Do you have anything that you find particularly useful?
I have written a lot of style files (in plain TeX, I am actually a quite passive LaTeX user) for things like handouts and tests I use in my teaching, including my side job as a flight instructor. Some specialized typesetting tasks, like multicolumn dictionary typesetting (was another side project) took a lot of macro writing, as well. I have also written a number of parsers in TeX for pretty-printing code (I use another great Knuth's invention, literate programming, quite a bit). I am addicted to TeX, I can see it now :)
> Automatic referencing, bibliography maintenance are quite unique to LaTeX and are easy to use.
I find that much easier to do in Word. Instead of wrangling with conflicting packages, documented for programmers not users, having to compile multiple times to get the references to actually render correctly, etc in Word I can simply define my references in a structured way and they work perfectly without surprises.
Word documents can be edited by people who have access to an appropriate version of Word (I do not, admittedly by choice) but the documents themselves are binary (ok, xml) mess, whereas LaTeX ones are greppable, searcheable, etc. They also 'age' much better. I can still LaTeX most documents from 20 years ago (sometimes with minor changes).
As a disclaimer, I am one of those people who uses (La)TeX for everything. I know TeX intimately to the point that I messed with the source code several times and wrote tens of thousands of TeX macros (this is not an exaggeration). I may be biased but I still feel that learning LaTeX is well worth the modest effort it takes to start writing LaTeX documents. And the typesetting TeX is capable of is still unsurpassed.