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If typesetting aesthetics are actually important to the document you're creating, you should be using software like LaTeX that figures out all the spacing for you. If you're typing up a word document for functional usage, it doesn't matter how many spaces you put in there

(Yes, I am giving you permission to go all e.e. cummings in your emails)

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I think LaTeX is overprescribed. It's great for academic papers, but a lot of the output from canned styles I see is lacking. Don't expect to get perfect typography if you don't understand the desired proportions between type size and spacing (see for example Bringhurst). LaTex is difficult to use if you are new to it or trying to do something custom.

Personally, I'd much rather use commercial software like InDesign/QuarkXPress and never touch LaTeX again. With that software, you can manually and visually tweak things like word spacing for particular paragraphs to solve problems like rivers. Of course InDesign will not automatically make documents look nice either, but it's easier to do if you know what you're trying to achieve. This is the kind of software used for modern magazine layout.

edit: smalltalk below also posted a similar reply as I was typing this, but is hellbanned

You are correct in stating that LaTeX is no silver bullet. The clear disadvantage of LaTeX is the tweak-recompile cycle, whereas graphical tools have instant feedback which is more suitable for design. But for automated typography (≠ design), it is still unsurpassed after all those years.

The default LaTeX styles are still way prettier and easier to read than the random muck (12pt Times, small margins) that would be more widespread otherwise. For scientific papers this is truly awesome, especially when the author does not care about typography. But you are right, LaTeX is not the correct tool for every job.

Now, if we can just get LaTex with instant feedback, we can approach the best of both worlds.

I use latexmk and coupled with a script which uses inotifywait. Evice automatically reloads the PDF on changes, so I get semi-instant feedback. Works okay for me.

On the off chance you're not aware of it,

  latexmk -pdf -pvc file.tex

does essentially that. If you like Unicode in your source (infinitely more readable and exactly the same keystrokes in Emacs)

  latexmk -xelatex -pvc source.tex

works.

IIRC, isn't Lyx what you are looking for ?

I never used it so I might be wrong.

-- Edit: http://www.lyx.org/

LyX is halfway there. It is a visual editor for LaTeX, but it does not actually show the final result. Instead, it operates on an intermediate representation. Stuff like section headings, math environments and tables are shown correctly (unless you use non-standard features), but margins and spacings are not. Ergo it isn't suitable for designing, or nitpicky typography. It calls this approach WYSIWYM – what you see is what you mean.

The user experience is quite similar to your regular word processor, except that the “paper” metapher is removed.

I tried it out for a while, but I feel more productive (and more in control) when using a regular editor with nice syntax highlighting.

The IPython notebook almost does it, using LaTeX for math and markdown for text. There are still a few issues at the moment, particularly lack of references, that keep me from doing real technical articles entirely from within the notebook.

http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html

Give Gummi a try if you haven't. Its automatically updating preview pane might have what you are looking for.

http://dev.midnightcoding.org/projects/gummi

I've added

  map <F4> :!pdflatex %

to my tex.vim. It's on demand, but after the first compilation it's almost instant. :)

Edit: as mentioned in another comment, Evince updates automatically when the file changes.

> Now, if we can just get LaTex with instant feedback, we can approach the best of both worlds.

Okay, try this: http://arachnoid.com/latex

It's not ideal, but it's a start on something that could be much more powerful.

On Linux, inotify, pdflatex, and evince combine in the expected way. I edit with vim and :w and it does the work in the background. Strictly, I use a Makefile and make, but that's not a real difference.

I keep meaning to dig into this sort of write-based build trigger, and I'm going to grab this excuse. As I understand it, inotify is a syscall, right? Do you have custom C code to hook it and trigger your make? What are the standard options for command-line access to inotify? Rudimentary googling suggests incron or watcher (not watch). Any other advice?

Hmn, how the heck did I miss all these related google results the last few times I tried to research this. I start looking at things like libnotify and can't help but notice while such technologies seem to be focused on other kinds of events, they seem like they might work for this kind of file-watching thing.

[inotify-tools](https://github.com/rvoicilas/inotify-tools/wiki) is the stuff you want. There's a nice utility called inotifywait in there which will block until there's a change in a file or directory (it does recursive as well).

You can get results from as simple as this bash one-liner:

     while(true); do inotifywait --exclude '.*.swp' -e close_write dir; make; done

I wrote that off the top of my head so it may not work straight off, but you get the idea.

LaTeX is a real tool, so naturally it takes quite some work for a beginner to be able to use it - the advantage is its raw power.

And yes you can definitely use it to do custom things, and yes it can be made to not move graphics around, which is usually the biggest complaint MS Word users has, but no you shouldn't do it.

William Adams (http://mysite.verizon.net/william_franklin_adams/portfolio.h...) is a typographer who has extensively used both InDesign/Quark and TeX. He has often posted his experience with the two in different tex related mailing lists: http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Comparison_between_ConTeXt_and...

I don't use LaTeX often at all, but I have found in the past that it was awesome for collaborative papers. Just check it in to version control, start taking advantage of include to break it up into logical parts and reduce the frequency of merges, and you're golden.

I think LaTeX is overprescribed.

I think it's underprescribed.

I've only just started using it (I've been aware of it and taken peaks from time to time). For both my own authoring and for marking up content from elsewhere (HTML or text dumps) it's quick, easy, and convenient. Some works take a while (lots of formatting and footnotes), others largely require only slapping on a prefix, an "\end{document}" at the end, and chapter headings.

Among the best aspects: once you've got marked-up Tex format, you can publish to pretty much any format you wish. The source can be managed under source control, you're free to use any editor you wish. Autoload / autobuild features make tracking minor tweaks easy (as others have noted, the evince PDF viewer will reload a file on change).

Styles can be modified. That's the brilliance of LaTeX. Write your text. Worry about the presentation side later. And the default styles _are_ good. Better by far than much of what goes on the Web these days.

And if you absolutely must, it's still possible to go to a specific layout tool to get pixel-perfect output.

In addition, LaTeX is clear that the preferred separation after a sentence is 1.5 spaces. The End.

What a compromise.

No, it's not. It is

  normal space + extra space ± stretch’/shrink’

where spaces depend on font, stretch’ and shrink’ depend on normal stretch/shrink and space factor.

Not to mention \frenchspacing (TLDR: it's also language-dependend)

You're being pedantic in muddying things with extra variables, namely the adjustment due to full justification. Let's simplify things and just consider ragged right. In this context, TeX is indeed approximately 1.5 spaces after a period, except for \frenchspacing, which uses 1 space.

AFAIK, the reason TeX uses this default spacing is because Don thought it looked good.

I always use \frenchspacing and make it 1.

So does InDesign, which uses the TeX algorithm, QuarkXPress, and just about any other application that lays out text. Even Word! Think of that! A program far more suited to laying out a visual medium (i.e., a visual program) could be as good or better than a 35 year old programming language that has a default typeface that's pretty much the most hideous ever designed by humankind (Knuth couldn't have done a worse job on Computer Modern).

>that figures out all the spacing for you

What are you even talking about? Yes Word figures out spacing for you too.

Typography is complex and Word is quite inadequate for that.

For example, take the simple subject of rivers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography)

LaTex knows about those and will try to avoid them.

Latex provides end results which are acceptable, typography-wise. Word is merely a word processor and cannot be trusted to produce the actual end result.

Word does just fine, thanks very much. My evidence: the millions of satisfied (or uncaring) Word users.

Word does "just fine" in the same sense that cheap wine or non-DSLR cameras do "just fine" for the majority of people. But that's a separate issue to quality.

Non-sequitur. There are plenty of non-DSLR tools for photography (TLR, rangefinders, large-format film) that are more than "just fine, and even within the world of digital, your average prosumer DSLR can't do the same thing as a setup with a medium format digital back. Give up the snobbery, DSLR does not necessarily equate to quality or superiority.

But most of them do not use it and expect to get good typography. Word is usually used for things where proper typography does not matter, things that in the past were written on type writers.

I enjoyed (at the time) technical writing using WordPerfect, FrameMaker, and InDesign. Getting the typography, page breaks, word wrap just so is very satisfying. Driving FrameMaker was a lot like programming, in the level of control and precision. Still miss it.

I was ambivalent towards PageMaker. Never used Quark for work, though I've met many fans.

I reserve special loathing for Word.

Word 6 was pretty good, and I used it enthusiastically.

But everything since has been user hostile. Getting the document you want is like fighting a surly baboon with Tourette's syndrome. You just have no idea what's going to be printed. There's no way to predict cause and effect (so you end up using a very limited set of features). And god help you if you change anything about your install (eg open the same doc on another computer, upgrade a driver).

No, LaTeX does not know anything about rivers and has no detection mechanisms for them. The line-breaking/spacing algorithms in TeX are just to old for that level of computational intensity.

There are some LuaTeX packages which can detect, but not fix, rivers, though their scalability is questionable.

What are you talking about? Word does not manage spacing (and other layout) on the level LaTeX does. Word processors usually allow you to type multiple adjacent spaces, which does not make any typographic sense. Instead, LaTeX uses spaces of different variable widths and heights. In some configurations, it will follow the double-width space after a sentence-convention.

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