There is no doubt that LaTeX produces way more beautiful documents than Microsoft Word, even if Word defaults settings are changed.
The thing is people need a word processor that comes out of the box with professional fonts, nice alignment parameters. They sure don't want a piece of software that begs them to download fuzzy fonts and paste text from a web page without reformatting all of this...
People don't want to learn a language for writing text either. They don't want to spend hours to find this package that would looks so great drawing a horizontal line under the header.
Apple Pages is a good alternative, it's my choice for creating professional documents (and believe me, I'm a real typomaniac) without losing time with LaTeX.
Between XeTeX and LyX, you can get all the nice professional fonts and kerning settings of professional desktop publishing suites, along with all the power of LaTeX. A good set of examples is shown on the Beauty of LaTeX page (http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex).
Comments
There is no doubt that LaTeX produces way more beautiful documents than Microsoft Word, even if Word defaults settings are changed.
The thing is people need a word processor that comes out of the box with professional fonts, nice alignment parameters. They sure don't want a piece of software that begs them to download fuzzy fonts and paste text from a web page without reformatting all of this...
People don't want to learn a language for writing text either. They don't want to spend hours to find this package that would looks so great drawing a horizontal line under the header.
Apple Pages is a good alternative, it's my choice for creating professional documents (and believe me, I'm a real typomaniac) without losing time with LaTeX.
Between XeTeX and LyX, you can get all the nice professional fonts and kerning settings of professional desktop publishing suites, along with all the power of LaTeX. A good set of examples is shown on the Beauty of LaTeX page (http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex).
If TeXMaCs were more stable it would be a pretty good step in this direction.