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Comment by qu83rt | Hacker News Reader

I'd be using LaTeX for professional looking documents.

LaTeX is great for professional-looking typesetting, and it has the power to do just about any layout tricks you want, but, in practice, you'll be fighting an uphill battle if you try to trick it into doing something that someone out there hasn't already written a package for.

(I say this as a professional mathematician, who lives his life in LaTeX. It's fantastic for writing math, and trusting that all the kerning etc. will be handled properly. However, when I want any formatting tricks, even after 25 years I still have to turn to my local TeX guru, who more often than not says "you don't really want to do that with TeX.")

Not sure what formatting tricks you mean, but that doesn't seem quite fair. When I want to do anything unusual, I google my problem and almost always there's a question on Tex stack exchange (which is blessed with the participation of most of the experts in the subject) with answers giving several easy ways to do it, using packages I already have on my computer! And it's easy to make your own commands when existing ones don't do the job.

The canonical one is forcing image placements. Sure you can Google and get a result, but all of them are prefixed with "if you _realy_ wany to do this here's my preferred workaround, but you should let Tex do the type setting".

> When I want to do anything unusual, I google my problem and almost always there's a question on Tex stack exchange (which is blessed with the participation of most of the experts in the subject) with answers giving several easy ways to do it, using packages I already have on my computer!

Yes, exactly! As I said:

> if you try to trick it into doing something that someone out there hasn't already written a package for.

There's an incredible package library out there, rivalling CPAN, and I love TeX and won't speak against it; but, if you try to step outside the package library (or even if you try to compose packages in sensible-seeming ways), as is very easy to do if you try to view TeX as a general-purpose typesetter, it rapidly becomes clear that there's a lot of magic going on that those packages hide away (more or less neatly, depending on their maturity), and that is hard to reproduce on your own, or add to.

I would say the vast majority of business documents, proposals, contracts, etc are collaborative editing with others. I didn't mention it but basically Google Docs and Sheets rules the world with these given we have a 50 user grandfathered account. For contracts, end result is exported to PDF and signed with Xournal and sent to the client for countersignature.

I meant to use LaTeX beamer to build these slides but couldn't figure an easy way to make the "Anatomy" figures eg. on slides 8,14,15 etc.

Tikz maybe?

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