(1) Lyx is a cross-platform graphical editor that spits out LaTeX, has reasonable UI for many of the interesting things you'd do in a TeX document, and has a pretty good set of preferences and controls. I used to swear by it.
(2) LaTeX is very painful to edit in, no matter what people tell you. Yes, Word does a crappy job of typesetting. But LaTeX is very 1985. You can get similar results in a visual editor with a page layout program; this is why so many people used to rave about Framemaker over Word. On the Mac, iWork's Pages.app will do a passable job; far better than Word. I've ported Quark templates to it without a problem.
Pages.app. We paid a couple hundred bucks for a (well-regarded) local graphic designer to build a print template for us that included typography, they delivered it in Quark, and I ported it over to Pages.
For what it's worth, I edit text in a text editor (Emacs), then use Markdown to get it into something that's easy to paste into Pages.app. I've done long-form editing in Pages.app, and I don't love it, but it's far less painful than LaTeX.
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Two responses:
(1) Lyx is a cross-platform graphical editor that spits out LaTeX, has reasonable UI for many of the interesting things you'd do in a TeX document, and has a pretty good set of preferences and controls. I used to swear by it.
(2) LaTeX is very painful to edit in, no matter what people tell you. Yes, Word does a crappy job of typesetting. But LaTeX is very 1985. You can get similar results in a visual editor with a page layout program; this is why so many people used to rave about Framemaker over Word. On the Mac, iWork's Pages.app will do a passable job; far better than Word. I've ported Quark templates to it without a problem.
> I used to swear by [LyX].
If I might ask, what do you use now?
Pages.app. We paid a couple hundred bucks for a (well-regarded) local graphic designer to build a print template for us that included typography, they delivered it in Quark, and I ported it over to Pages.
For what it's worth, I edit text in a text editor (Emacs), then use Markdown to get it into something that's easy to paste into Pages.app. I've done long-form editing in Pages.app, and I don't love it, but it's far less painful than LaTeX.