Until yesterday I was attached to the idea of having a word processor; a program to handle it all, if you will. While looking for alternatives, I learned about LaTeX. I really like the idea of focusing on the content first, and then going back to fix the appearance. I thought LaTeX (and other needed programs) would be the solution, but I don't think so anymore. Or the way I learned about LaTeX, focus on the content and then apply the styles with a script, or something along those lines.

Here's what I'm thinking: a file could hold just the content (and mark-ups indicating style), another file to hold the style/template. This way templates can span across several different files and they would all look the same. Or conversely, the same content could hold different styles/templates. Then a program could take in the two files and output a postscript or pdf file. I suppose the best way to think of it is XHTML/CSS, with more features. The problem with using XHTML/CSS, in my opinion, is there are different rendering engines which will render the mark-up differently. Simple example: firefox vs. IE vs. Opera. Another problem with XHTML/CSS that's not present in LaTeX is backwards compatability. According to my research, a TeX file written a long time ago with a previous version will still look the same using a newer version, which I believe is not so with XHTML/CSS.

In my research, I also got this article: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~smcpeak/...atislatex.html

While I'm not sure if I'll be doing complex styles such as coloumns, having a style mark-up language that can do complex styling would be absolutely wonderful!

The other features of LaTeX that I liked was output device independence (similar to OOo2, what shows up isn't based on the current printer, but would look the same to everyone), portability, and I suppose macros would be good too. Any ideas of [sets of] programs that can accomplish this? Can LaTeX do all that, and I just haven't looked into it enough?

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Another thing I think may be pretty neat would be a quick feature for enabling certain features at the beginning of the document, and then allowing for adjustments for specific items. I suppose the best way to sum that up is object orientation. Let's say I want to enable page numbering, at the beginning of the styling file would be a switch to turn that on. But if I'm writing a paper with sources, I'll need to have a work cited page, which, according to MLA formatting and styling, should't have a page number. In that event, I would need to be able to turn that off. Or maybe for some odd reason I want to skip a page number, or even start with a number other than 1 (something OOo has trouble with).

As far as I know, and have tried, TeX (note, TeX is not the same as LaTeX which is not the same as some other *TeX packages) can do pretty much anything you like. The downside is that it's often not as easy to "tweak" it as it is if you're using MS Word. TeX is aimed at "scientific" publications, for example it offers some specific ways to represent formulas and special mathematical (or physics related) symbols. The idea of TeX is that there are some rules for what kind of text is easy to read (how wide the text lines can be so enough content fits on a page, but so that the reader can read the text easily without waving her/his head), and that the writer doesn't have to focus on the outlook, but can focus almost solely on the content. In the publications that are created with TeX the outlook is usually the same anyway, there is no need to make it look extraordinary or different for every work. MS Word and other word processors (note: TeX is not a word processor, it's more a "typesetting language") are meant to do extraordinary works that you quickly write and quickly edit to look like you want, "small jobs". TeX is something you can use to write whole books or reports with mathematical formulas in them (typing formulas is a real pain in word processors nowadays).

If you take a look at TeX (or LaTeX in your case) formatting options, you'll notice you can change pretty much anything. TeX builds the document up from small blocks, and the thing is how those box are "glued" together (simply expressed). If you want, you can change the orientation, Z-order and a lot of other things of every single box, be it a letter, picture or anything else on the page. You can change marginals, lines, formatting and even create your own "commands" in TeX (for example you can define that where ever you write something X, it's written as something Y, to shorten the typing of some special things). Therefore it probably can do what you're asking, but to do all those nifty small things takes it's time. Usually when I write documents with TeX, I have already set up the "normal" settings like charset, what the document looks like (book, report, ...) and so on, and then simply write the thing down without touching anything else (except adding the TeX "commands" where needed, like titles).

If you need a thing where you can type some content, then make it green and blue and spend time just to get the outlook perfect, TeX is probably what you're not looking. TeX is about forgetting the outlook, letting the program decide it (the settings, described well on web, are really thinked about to make the result easy to read - something that word processors don't do), and focusing on the content. Word processors are about quickly typing something and focusing on the outlooks. HTML and such are then about coding a lot of irrelevant stuff, focusing on the outlook and then thinking what went wrong. HTML is good for web pages, word processors good for one-page screaming big announces or ads, TeX is good for books and publications, and a lot of other things are good for other things.

What you're asking is probably FrontPage.

EDIT: Wikipedia has a lot of good information about what TeX/LaTeX is and what it is not. Read it. You don't get the whole picture just by trying it out yourself, and you definitely are going to think all sorts of things about it that it is not, unless you study it a bit. Just like people think they can write books with MS Word.

My : TeX/LaTeX is a very powerful language, not easy... but not so painful! A very good guide is the one written from Leslie Lamport, the LaTex's author, "LaTeX: A Document Preparation System, 2nd Edition".
You may also have a look at LyX, a sort of GUI front-end for Latex. However, don't think you can use LyX without any knowledge of Latex: LyX make tasks easier, but it is not a word processor as you can think at a first glance. Furthermore there is a very active community (mailing list) to ask for help (as much as LQ)!

Right... I think I may be a little confused here. What I do now is if I want to jot some notes down that nobody else will see, I put it in a simple text file written with vim. If I have something like a report, essay, article, resume, etc. I would use a word processor.

What I was thinking is something like a report or article (with columns) will have the same content, but different format. Or having different the same resume but in different styles? Or vice versa, since I will have a general resume, industrial resume, academia resume, and governmental resume, they can all look the same, but have different content. So here a program similar to LaTeX (or maybe TeX/LaTeX) will get the job done efficiently and hog up less space.

colucix, thanks for those texts! I'll definitely check them out. I know LaTeX comes with a learning curve, but like any learning curve, I'm ready to challenge it!