Question

Document editors are nice but they have their limitations.
What is a good alternative to them?
I already know HTML and CSS and while they can do the job, they are ill-suited for printed documents.
I was thinking in learning LaTeX, because many scholars use it. But I wonder if someone would recommend another language such as postscript.

Answer 1

I finally got a chance to write an entire paper in LaTeX for my final semester of College and found it to be easier than I thought it would be. A couple of the nice things I found about it were

1. A fairly lightweight syntax for most things (tables being the only real offender, but no one can get text tables right).
2. An extremely wide array of syntax for doing anything from automatically marking up a chemical formula to writing inline lists.
3. Beautiful output automatically.
4. Extremely easy to write modular documents where I might store a chapter in a file and then simply \include{} it in another. One particularly nice use I found for this was to include code that I had written in the document simply by referencing the files.
5. Wonderful support for footnotes and bibliographic references.
6. Libraries for just about anything you can imagine.

The major drawbacks are, IMHO:

1. A lack of any real direction or life in the language. It feels dead, and not because it’s done.
2. A frustrating build process, although there are tools to help with that, from a simple bash script to a full fledged make file.

If you’re interested in learning LaTeX, I would recommend starting out by reading the Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2e PDF.

However, I decided against using LaTeX for most things that I write these days specifically because it feels dead and has a frustrating build process. I instead switched over to MultiMarkdown, as it is well supported and can be transformed into a large array of other formats, including LaTeX which can then be hand massaged if you really need to in order to get it the format expected by some publication. If you haven’t played with MultiMarkdown or Markdown before, then I highly recommend checking them out. The syntax is extremely lightweight and natural, even compared to LaTeX. I find that except for some of the higher level typographical constructs, MultiMarkdown supports everything I need on a regular basis.

My 2 cents.