I have heard a lot about LaTeX, but never used it myself.
It is mainly used for typesetting professional research papers. But I am not writing research papers.
Is LaTeX for me? If yes, why should I be shifting from OpenOffice to LaTeX? What does LaTeX offer to the normal user who uses word processing software to make all kind of report documents?
Best Answer
Superficially, one of the advantages of LaTeX over other more traditional systems (e.g. Word or OpenOffice) is the high typographical quality of the documents that you'll be able to produce. This is particularly true for documents that are heavy on mathematics, but documents for any other area could also take advantage of these qualities.
A less obvious advantage, but much more important, is that LaTeX allows you to clearly separate the content from the format of your document. As a writer (scientist, researcher or not), this gives you the opportunity to focus on the “what”, the creative part of your work, rather than the “how” is it going to look printed out in paper (that is the work of LaTeX document class designers).
Now, you shouldn't use LaTeX if
You don't have time to learn it. Unlike most other point&click systems, LaTeX does take some time to learn. There are of course many guides and tutorials that can help you with this, but don't try to learn LaTeX if you have, say, less than 24 hours to prepare a manuscript.
Your document is already written. Say, if you have already written your thesis in Word, there isn't much point in trying to “convert” your document to LaTeX. You can do it, but the results won't be pretty. LaTeX isn’t just another document type to “Save-As”, it's a complete system to help you write those documents.
What you care about is the design of the document. If you do care about creating your own designs for your documents (rather than the content), LaTeX is perhaps not the best system for you. There are a number of packages (perhaps most notably memoir) that allow you to customize the look of your document, but things are not always straightforward. Having said that, if you are a designer, of course we would welcome your help in designing new document classes and templates!