> BTW, not to tamper enthusiasms, but the "standard" output of > LaTeX/TeX is not quite (yet) at the level that a professional > typesetter would produce.
Obviously, an experienced competent human being will (almost) always be able to deliver better results than *any* algorithm. But since I am a non-typographer myself and since there is no money to pay one nor the time for him to do his/her work, manual typesetting is not an available option in my case (technical reports, sent out via email and printed on office printers on A4 paper). Personally I'm already infinitely grateful that I can now use microtype with OTF fonts, since I don't like CM/LM *at all* and microtype has essentially eliminated that fiddling with overfull/underfull errors. Besides, I tend to need italic small caps for my texts (lots of acronyms), which no "pure" LaTeX typeface has anyway afaik. Well, Libertine maybe? EB Garamond would have them, but that one doesn't have a semibold yet. > And I say this as a LyX-only writer for the past 15 years or so. The first public LyX version was when? Can't have been much longer than 10 years ago. > Things like page-balancing, micro-adjustments, etc., are still very > hard to do in Latex. E.g. typesetting multiple (>2) columns to a fixed baseline-grid seems to be impossible. Apparently this would be a "must" for magazines printed on thin A4 paper. > The "out of the box" "standard" output that you get before you start > tampering with countless LaTeX commands is good, but not excellent. > Publishers who can afford professional typesetters are better off > asking their authors to deliver Word files, then import that into > InDesign, and let the pros do their jobs. And typesetters do not use > LaTex (by and large). Probably because it's not the typesetters themselves who decide about their own worktools...? > On the other hand, there are now publishing houses (especially in the > Humanities) that go to press directly from Word output... I wouldn't read that if you paid me for it by the hour. Well, at a rate of >>100 EUR/h maybe. Since I've started to use LyX/LaTeX, whenever I look at a PDF or printed copy of the crap that Word produced from my hard labour (input), I almost cry. Such a lot of work for nothing, (almost) no one ever read those tens of thousand of pages that I wrote over all those years, just because it *is* unreadable. Word should be outlawed. Heck, it *is* outlawed within the European Community (due to non-compliance with software ergonomics regulations), but what manager cares. A cute combination for some applications would be something like Scribus for the page layout and LyX to edit the content of the text, then let LaTeX do the line- and page-breaking of the individual columns. Scribus knows frames with content rendered by outside programs and among others it allows to embed LaTeX PDF output in these, but I haven't tried it yet. Sincerely, Wolfgang
