I have had to update my resume lately and a while ago I wrote it using LaTeX
which is a typesetting program. Typesetting programs are different then word
processors as they allow you to focus more on the content rather then laying
everything out on the page. A few cases where LaTeX trounces Microsoft word is
when you are writing anything that uses a predefined layout that must be
adhered to such as a paper written in MLA format or a book. While it excels in
some areas it fails miserably in others, for most use cases anyway. So you are going
to have your work cut out for you if you are trying to make posters, fliers,
banners, and any other type of thing where you really want to focus on layout
while writing.
While I don't write many MLA papers anymore, LaTeX is still the de facto
standard for writing papers in academia and it is great for writing anything
that contains a lot of math equations. If you have ever used Microsoft Word's
equation editor, you can see that it is time consuming and using LaTeX markup
is still not going to be faster then writing on paper but the convenience of
dealing with files makes it worth it.
Having justed installed LyX which is basically a mode targeted GUI for LaTeX, I
wanted to test it out in one of my classes today to take notes. It worked
pretty good, but I have to admit, I had trouble keeping my notes up to date
with the teacher's presentation since Gleb's just too fast. In the end though, I
could see how neat my notes looked and I am much more likely to refer to them
later due to their well printed equations and general legibility.
In the future I might want to put some of my notes online since a lot of the
stuff I am learning isn't well documented on the net. LaTeX has the capacity
to do this, but the tools that shipped with the Windows' version of LyX
couldn't handle the math that I was writing. It tried to convert the math code
into HTML4 which has various math symbols which are not very portable among
different platforms and web browsers. At this time I could still publish the
documents as PDFs but I don't want to force people to use a viewer application.
There are plugins for converting the math parts into image files and then
embedding those images inside of the html that I have used in the past but this
has a few problems of its own. One glaring example is not being able to resize
the document. I take that back, you still can but your images are not going to
scale very well since they are raster based and they will be hard to read at
different sizes.
So I don't think there is distribution one solution that fits everyone needs,
but by providing choices I should be able to overcome both limitations by
having a PDF option as well.