The cost of learning how to write Latex documents becomes amortized over the number of times you use it. I'm at the point now where it would take me longer to produce equivalent documents in Word than using Latex. (And in the case of articles fit for print, an order of magnitude longer.)
LaTeX makes it easy to make something clean out of a bunch of text.
But when graphics enter, I'm easily stuck loosing a lot of time. For now, i tend to use tikz and will learn Inkscape, after bad experiences with dia, metapost, etc. Sure under MacOS Omnigraffle produces great output...
Graphics are orthogonal to a Latex document. You specify where to find the graphic, what format it's in and how to orient it. Making the graphic is outside of the Latex process, which I am fine with.
All papers I make for publication have data graphs and figures aplenty, and it would still take me longer with Word.
I agree that including figures is a strong part of LaTeX, I believe, as you have good control over it. What takes times, is drawing a diagram to illustrate something.
Resorting to external tools and inserting is OK, but you often don't have the same visual quality as the rest of the document. Here I don't know many really good tools. That's why people still take a lot of time with pstricks, TikZ and the likes!
Comments
The cost of learning how to write Latex documents becomes amortized over the number of times you use it. I'm at the point now where it would take me longer to produce equivalent documents in Word than using Latex. (And in the case of articles fit for print, an order of magnitude longer.)
LaTeX makes it easy to make something clean out of a bunch of text.
But when graphics enter, I'm easily stuck loosing a lot of time. For now, i tend to use tikz and will learn Inkscape, after bad experiences with dia, metapost, etc. Sure under MacOS Omnigraffle produces great output...
Good documents are not only text...
Graphics are orthogonal to a Latex document. You specify where to find the graphic, what format it's in and how to orient it. Making the graphic is outside of the Latex process, which I am fine with.
All papers I make for publication have data graphs and figures aplenty, and it would still take me longer with Word.
I agree that including figures is a strong part of LaTeX, I believe, as you have good control over it. What takes times, is drawing a diagram to illustrate something.
Resorting to external tools and inserting is OK, but you often don't have the same visual quality as the rest of the document. Here I don't know many really good tools. That's why people still take a lot of time with pstricks, TikZ and the likes!
I recently discovered graphviz to layout my graphs. (Graphs as in graph theory.)
In LaTeX you'll spend your time learning how to get it to do the right thing.
In Word, you'll spend your time coercing word to do what you want.
The difference: you learn, Word doesn't.
Oh, and Word doesn't do emacs keybindings, which is ridiculous. LaTeX you can just edit in emacs, which is wonderful.