I consider myself a Word power user. I've spent 1000s of hours in it and I know just about every obscure feature and quirk. I've designed professional corporate template suites in it.

I hate it so much. It is so fucking archaic and janky. It has so many modal dialogs. There are features I need to get to regularly that are like 6 modal dialogs deep, and I have to close them all to see if the change I made was good; if not I have to go through them all over again.

It has a sort of stylesheet, but it has built in styles that you can't delete if you don't need, and the inheritance hierarchy among them is a mess. Then there are "font themes" which are conceptually separate from the styles but can impact them.

I could go on. All the Word alternatives aren't much better because they imitate Word too closely in my opinion. I think the approach to word processors needs to be rethought at fundamentally level.

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 20 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I haven't seen any WYSIWYG document editors that are any good. Markdown/Org for simpler stuff, L^A^T~E~X for more complicated stuff, or mix them together with pandoc.

[–] sheridan@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

I know that workflow style is good for like dissertations and academic journal articles, but the sort of templates I have to design and work in are more splashy and dramatic. The look and structure is more akin to what you see in artsy magazines and books—pages with dark background colors, decorative stock images, vector shapes, etc. Can Latex be used for that?

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 days ago

Ah, it's not the best for cases like that, especially if you need to make different layouts all the time. You can get it to do anything with enough packages and positioning hints, but at some point it becomes too much of a chore. If you just need a dozen of layouts and then fill them out with different content, it's doable.

[–] glizzyguzzler@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 points 3 days ago

You cannot control where pictures occur within a text body in latex, it decides for you. You can give it recommendations, but it’ll figure out the final alignment when rendering to page. I’m not sure that’s a limitation you want for design-focused use cases.

And if you want to do something seriously nice you need to code a it in latex’s reverse Polish notation code language from hell, let me tell you latex ain’t the future of ease haha

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 2 points 3 days ago

For snazzy layouts for publishing and stuff, you might want to give Scribus a try! It's like an alternative to Microsoft's "Publisher."

https://www.scribus.net/

[–] ranzispa@mander.xyz 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I would not use latex for any document that should be a template for other people to fill in. Unless you're a peer reviewed journal.

I wouldn't use latex for anything that requires precise positioning of images and elements. InDesign and similar are a much better option.

I do like to use markdown for any document that does not fall into those categories. I like to use latex for any document I'm writing which I want someone else to style.

Latex is very cool for styling, but in my experience most of the time you do not really need that amount of configurability and the added time to correctly make a styled document in latex is way more than what it would take you in word, even when you have to fight word to make it. That is unless you need equations, but then again: just write markdown with latex equations.

[–] Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club 2 points 3 days ago

On my end, it looks like you tried to layout your comment with Latex and failed. :D

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