The standard tool for professional typesetting and book design – Adobe InDesign.

InDesign is great, but how do you typeset equations in it? Genuine question, as I’ve searched far and wide for a viable solution. The best I have so far is ”create in another software and insert as an image”, which is unsatisfactory.

> Adobe InDesign.

I've always seen ID as a graphical design tool and not as a manuscript authoring/publishing tool.

Sure, you can plop a bunch of text in there, but it seems to be that it is very structure-free when it comes to layout, whereas the stuff I mentioned is more line-oriented, and therefore more focused on text. Does it have things like footnote/reference tracking? Spell- and grammar-checking?

It's not a manuscript authoring tool, but I thought we were talking about alternatives for 'perfect typesetting.' I don't think there's any tool that is ideal for both authoring and typesetting, but since we do have this special word 'manuscript' to describe a work that hasn't been typeset yet, maybe it is useful to continue thinking of authoring as a separate task (at least if you aspire to perfection), rather than something that needs to be done at the same time, using the same tools, as typesetting.

Hasn't QuarkXPress been regaining market share due to Adobe's licensing policies? How does that hold up?

Isn't QuarkXPress, like InDesign, more graphical design-focused and not so much manuscript authoring/publishing-focused?

That is my understanding, too, but my understanding of this subthread was about achieving the best possible results in general, rather than just in the subset of manuscript authoring tooling.