There's definitely a learning curve to LaTeX, but not a huge one, as it's mostly just a markup language. If you want to get in to the programming side of it, or if you want to learn one of the larger LaTeX packages really well, that would take you more time, but not even then it shouldn't scare anyone, particularly if you've learned other high level programming languages before. Diving in to TeX itself could be a different story, but I can't comment since I've never bothered to learn it myself, and haven't had to for anything that I've done with LaTeX.
Where LaTeX shines is for cases where you don’t really care about the details of the layout, but just want someone else to handle it all in a somewhat sensible way when you hand them a basic manuscript, and not shit all over itself the way MS Word does on a regular basis.
LaTeX is great for generic college papers where you don’t have figures and don’t have time to worry about the layout. By contrast it’s a huge pain in the butt for something like magazines, coffee-table books, or posters.
(It’s also the best way to typeset mathematical formulas, of course.)
- nice block text adjustment, line-breaks and hyphenation, line/paragraph,chapter spacing
- margins and padding, page numbers, and chapter headings
- font selection, supporting ligatures and kerning if you are fancy
I'm sure the devil is in the details, but how much detail can there be in basic running text? I'm fine reading novels rendered by basic html engines without css, even in monospaced font. The most important consideration for a text layout engine seems to be the font data format and corresponding font engine, which I don't know much about, because I don't really care.
You'd think that typesetting a novel would be a gimme, but in the current ecosystem (tex or otherwise) it's a shambles.
I use it mainly for technical documentation (product manuals, etc.), so I've never tried the memoir class. But what I find myself doing mostly these days is makinng my own classes, usually based on article because it seems to me to have the most 'neutral' defaults.
It's a very steep learning curve, but I've found it an extremely valuable technology to be able to use.
Asking questions on the TeX stack overflow is a pretty good way to get help also.
I'm now reading on ConTeXt and it seems to be a much more adequate TeX format. For one thing, it supports grid typesetting! LaTeX's philosophy is to separate style and content, leaving the style to "someone else". It seems that ConTeXt's philosophy is to separate style and content, but still make it easy for the user to choose the style. It's also more integrated: comprehensive core, few third-party packages, meaning less compatibility issues (but less choice too). I'll definitely try it for my next project.
what does this mean? I haven't seen that term before. I assume it's nothing to do with tables..
Generally you also want the baseline of titles to fall on the grid. Possibly also the formulas, figures etc.
LaTeX is pretty bad at this: by default it inserts stretchable vertical space between paragraphs, and around things like bullet lists, centered text and formulas.
Stretchable space is a good thing when you have a lot of elements beside simple paragraphs: it gives TeX flexibility to produce a nice page layout. For example the optimal spacing around equations might not be a multiple of the inter-line space. And you might still want to have the last line land precisely at the bottom of the page, so there must be a stretchable space somewhere. This flexibility also helps avoiding widows and orphans[1].
On the other hand I think non-grid-aligned text looks terrible for novels, especially when the page is thin and you can see through the paper the text on the other side (it's much less noticeable if the lines on both sides are perfectly aligned). Grid typesetting is also nice when you have multiple columns of text on the same page: it looks odd if the lines of one column are not aligned with those in the next column.
Of course, it's all about using a good template. Usually I find there are tons of resources out there, but it does often involve finding someone with the same problem and asking the right question.
You can check out the LaTeX template in the repo.
http://chrisanthropic.github.io/Open-Publisher-Documentation...
By the way, a really excellent book for (plain) TeX is A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy: it's truly for the beginner, yet at the end you'll be practically an expert, or at least know how to become one.
I've seen people get frustrated with LaTeX (not TeX), but that's because it was designed to make it difficult to do typesetting: instead the LaTeX philosophy is to specify only the document structure, and leave all the typesetting to a package that you hope someone has written.
Your comment is making me reevaluate what I thought I understood.
If you're writing a paper for publication in a journal, they probably have their own typesetting style. With LaTeX you can just specify your paper as a sequence of paragraphs, "sections", a title, an author, and so on, and, by including the journal's style file (assuming it's good), your paper will come out typeset in that journal's style. This philosophy is explained at https://www.latex-project.org/about/
This is great for certain (many) kinds of documents. The problem with this, though, is that the moment you want to change the appearance and get into typesetting yourself, you're fighting a system that was actively designed to prevent you from doing this.
An analogy may be a system like, say, WordPress: if what you have is a blog, then it would work for you, and you even get to choose one of several “themes” that others have written, and so on. The set of available plugins and customizations can even be impressively versatile (for example, I noticed that time.com runs on WordPress, and apparently so do a number of other non-blog sites: https://vip.wordpress.com/clients/). But ultimately, if you're trying to figure it out by yourself and have your own ideas about what your website should look like, a system like this will always be more frustrating than the alternative (of having full control).
TeX is not difficult to use, though in the beginning you'd have to specify manually things like the typesetting of the document title (put it in a bold font at 16pt, centered on a line...). LaTeX has features to automate many such common typesettings tasks, but it has its own flaws (some stemming from the fact that it's implemented using TeX macros, which weren't designed for such heavy “programming”).
If all you have is a passing curiosity though, you may just want to look at some examples: Knuth has .tex sources of some of his papers on his website (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/preprints.html); you can look at them and compare with the resulting PDF files (which you can generate with `pdftex`). For an already typeset example, look at JRM2680.tex (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/JRM2680.tex) and JRM2680.pdf (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/JRM2680.pdf).
You don't say "make a heading", you say "make this text in 14pt font, bold, with this much extra vertical space.
Folks are also highly scared off of TeX due to some of its aesthetic nature. Specifically, it looks rather different than most modern languages.
That said, I think most of that fear is unfounded and I regret that I let it keep me from learning this while in college.
I've had complete strangers email me with Tex questions just from encountering my thesis.
The community on Stack Exchange was very helpful for me.
All of the CSS/HTML based solutions cost thousands per license, so that's out.
I'm now on to SILE, which fixes a lot of problems with tex. I can only hope that it's advanced enough to properly typeset a novel.